Publication week is always a tricky time. The elation of being published is balanced by the anxieties that come with having a new novel hit the bookshops.

This week DEATH OF A LESSER GOD, the fourth in my award-winning Malabar House series, was published in the UK, in hardback. The book is set in 1950, Bombay… Englishman James Whitby is due to hang for the murder of an Indian lawyer. As Persis, India’s first female police detective, and Archie, a forensic scientist from England, investigate, they are led to a second murder – that of an African-American soldier stationed in India during WW2. Soon they find themselves travelling to the old colonial capital of Calcutta in search of a killer… The book is receiving a lot of love and great early reviews. Early orders really impact how a book is promoted, so I would be immensely grateful if you chose to order a copy. It also happens to be a thing of beauty! Would make a lovely gift. And you can find many options to order by clicking here.

This is my ninth novel. It doesn’t get any easier. Big publisher or small. Experienced writer or newbie. I won’t pretend that some of the jitters aren’t ameliorated by a publisher with marketing resources, but the one thing this industry has taught me is that no one really knows. 

Having said this, I am fortunate to have had a schedule of events to help launch Death of a Lesser God and great reviews – in the FT, the Literary Review, Heat Magazine, LoveReading, and the Mail on Sunday among others. The highlight so far? A ‘soft’ launch in Ann Cleeves’ home town of Whitley Bay. Ann baked me scones and we chatted about murder at her kitchen table – where she has written many of her Vera, and Shetland novels. Ann has been a great supporter of the books!

In each of these books I try and reveal some of the hidden history of the subcontinent.

The second half of Death of a Lesser God is set in 1950s Calcutta. In the book I describe the city thus: “Once a pestilential riverine swamp, infested by bamboo jungles where tigers roamed freely, snacking on unsuspecting locals, the city was, in part, an invention of the British, who’d purchased the rights to the local land and the villages that sat upon it. One of those villages had been Kalikata, from which it was said Calcutta took its name.”

Calcutta became a base for British operations in India, with the colossal Writers Building housing the monolithic bureaucracy needed to govern the subcontinent – ‘writers’ being the name for the army of East India Company clerks who populated the building, dressed in woollen suits in the searing tropical heat, mildewing in the annual monsoon, and dying, variously of dysentery, malaria, and drunkenness. Over time, the city became mired in the independence movement, until, in 1911, fed up with the argumentative Bengalis, the British upped sticks and moved their base of operations to Delhi. 

Chowringhee Square, Calcutta in 1945. Image credit: Public Domain

The Malabar House novels, beginning with Midnight at Malabar House, were born of my desire to explore India just after Independence, a nation still reeling in the wake of Gandhi’s assassination and the horrors of Partition when a million Indians died in communal riots. My lead character, Persis, is determined to prove herself in a man’s world, but is banished to Bombay’s smallest police station, Malabar House, populated by rejects and misfits. (The Times said: “Think Mick Herron in Bombay.”) The books contain many characters that reflect the viewpoint of Englishmen born or inhabiting India with the intrinsic belief that they were gods in all but name – ‘lesser gods’, if you will – hence the title.

If you do buy the book, I hope you enjoy it!