Blurb:

Bombay, New Year’s Eve, 1949

As India celebrates the arrival of a momentous new decade, Inspector Persis Wadia stands vigil in the basement of Malabar House, home to the city’s most unwanted unit of police officers. Six months after joining the force she remains India’s first female police detective, mistrusted, sidelined and now consigned to the midnight shift.
And so, when the phone rings to report the murder of prominent English diplomat Sir James Herriot, the country’s most sensational case falls into her lap.

As 1950 dawns and India prepares to become the world’s largest republic, Persis, accompanied by Scotland Yard criminalist Archie Blackfinch, finds herself investigating a case that is becoming more political by the second. Navigating a country and society in turmoil, Persis, smart, stubborn and untested in the crucible of male hostility that surrounds her, must find a way to solve the murder – whatever the cost.

Review:

I’ve listened to several episodes of The Red Hot Chili Writers, which is the podcast hosted by Vaseem Khan with Abir Mukherjee, so I’ve been familiar with Vaseem Khan for some time, but only now got round to reading his work. He’s an intelligent writer with an amazing vocabulary, and I was immediately taken to India in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The sights, sounds and smells are so vividly described that I was able to sense all of them as if I was part of the scene myself and this kept me completely engaged from the beginning of the novel to the very end.

Midnight At Malabar House is set against the backdrop of the Partition in India, and I was so interested to learn more about this aspect of history. It’s not a subject I know much about, but Vaseem Khan has researched this so well (and I assume from his author’s note at the end of the book that he has used accounts provided by members of his own family) that it’s impossible not to feel the tension that was present in India at the time and be conscious of the impact it had on everyone who was involved. 

I love that the protagonist, Persis, is a female police detective. This is obviously very rare for the time at which the book is set and her endeavours to find a murderer (among some very wealthy people) are inevitably met with resistance. I love her no-nonsense attitude and determination and I look forward to seeing her character develop in the following books in the series.

Although Midnight At Malabar House is quite a political novel, there is also a mystery to solve and I found the plot quite fast paced and very intriguing. There are so many suspects that I did sometimes struggle to keep up with who was who, but I was very keen to find out what had happened. The plot is full of fascinating revelations and I loved trying to piece it all together – something at which I didn’t succeed!

Midnight At Malabar House is available from Amazon.