The sixth rip-roaring thriller in the award-winning Malabar House series and a perfect entry point for new readers.

India, 1951. After wilfully ignoring orders, Persis Wadia, India’s first female police detective, is exiled from Bombay to the wild and mountainous Naga Hills District. As India’s first post-Independence election looms, and tensions rise across the country, Persis finds herself banished to the Hotel Victoria, a crumbling colonial-era relic, her career in tatters.

But when a prominent politician is murdered in his locked room at the Victoria, his head missing, she is thrust back into the fray. Is the murderer one of the foreigners staying at the hotel or an insurgent from the surrounding jungle? As the political situation threatens to explode, Persis has only days to stop a killer operating at the very edge of darkness…

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‘Persis Wadia, denizen of India’s own Slough House – Malabar House in Bombay – has been further sidelined. She is far from Bombay in the remote Naga Hills, an area of rebels and lawlessness which may just swallow her whole. Persis is a brilliant creation … With a satisfying backdrop of little-known aspects of newly independent India’s history and the ever-present tension with the remaining British colonists, this is a richly satisfying book at many levels’ ~ ALIS HAWKINS