A Rising Man

Calcutta, April 1919. Captain Sam Wyndham arrives from Britain to join the Imperial Police, hoping that a new post will put distance between him and the war, the death of his wife and the morphine habit he has carried with him. Almost immediately he is handed the murder of Alexander MacAuley, a senior British official found with his throat cut and a warning that the British must leave India. Assisted by Inspector Digby and the sharp, Oxford-educated Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee, Wyndham follows the case through government offices, wealthy European households, nationalist circles and the city’s opium dens.

The investigation unfolds during one of the decisive weeks of the British Raj. The Rowlatt Acts have expanded the colonial government’s powers of detention, protests are spreading, and news of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer’s killing of civilians at Jallianwala Bagh reaches Calcutta while Wyndham is still pursuing the murderer. Mukherjee uses the crime to expose the racial hierarchy and political insecurity beneath imperial confidence, while the friendship between Wyndham and Banerjee begins under pressures that will shape the rest of the series.