A Necessary Evil

India, 1920. Sam Wyndham and Surendranath Banerjee witness the assassination of the heir to the princely state of Sambalpore during a visit to Calcutta. Their enquiries take them into the prince’s homeland, a wealthy kingdom of diamond mines, palaces and elaborate court ritual where the dead man’s political reforms, private relationships and religious enemies have created no shortage of suspects. The succession places his apparently unserious younger brother closer to the throne, while the British authorities are anxious to preserve order without exposing how fragile their influence may be.

The second Wyndham and Banerjee novel shifts attention from directly governed Calcutta to the princely states that survived under British paramountcy. Mukherjee uses the murder investigation to explore the bargains that sustained indirect rule: Indian rulers retained courts, titles and considerable local power, but their security depended upon accommodation with the Raj. Wyndham and Banerjee must therefore solve a royal killing inside a political system where dynastic interest, colonial diplomacy and personal loyalty overlap, and where an apparently straightforward succession can threaten far more than one family.