Death in the East

Name: Death in the East
Rating: 4.4 (8414 reviews)

by Abir Mukherjee Book 4 in the Wyndham and Banerjee Series series.

First published 2019

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4.4(8,414)

The fourth Wyndham and Banerjee novel moves between two investigations separated by seventeen years. In London in 1905, the young constable Sam Wyndham becomes involved in the murder of Bessie Drummond, a woman from his past whose death exposes the violence and prejudice of the East End. In 1922, Wyndham leaves Calcutta for an ashram in Assam, hoping to break his dependence on opium. Instead he encounters a man he believed had died long ago and becomes convinced that an unfinished piece of his London history has followed him across the empire.

By alternating Edwardian London with late-Raj India, Mukherjee shows how Wyndham’s personal history is entangled with wider structures of race, class and imperial power. The 1905 chapters reveal the social world in which he became a policeman; the Assam narrative places the older detective in an India transformed by the independence movement and by his own friendship with Surendranath Banerjee. The mystery is therefore both a confrontation with an old crime and an examination of how far Wyndham has travelled—geographically, morally and politically—since his earliest years in the force.