The Burning Grounds

With a cracking double mystery plot, The Burning Grounds demonstrates why CWA Dagger Award-winner and twice Edgar-nominated author Abir Mukherjee is an international bestseller and critical favorite. In late 1920s Calcutta, India, the British are hanging on by any means necessary in the wake of the Home Rule movement. Amid those tensions, Detective Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Surendranath “Suren” Banerjee reunite to solve two seemingly separate but urgent cases—a high-profile murder and a disappearance that hits too close to home. It’s been a long three years since the events of The Shadows of Men, the last installment in the series. Having helped the increasingly restive and nationalist Suren flee the country after he was arrested on trumped-up charges, Sam has been persona non grata in the Imperial Police Force. So when J.P. Mullick, a well-known and widely beloved ultrawealthy Indian business tycoon, is found with his throat slit among the funeral pyres of the burning ghats, and the new chief inspector assigns Sam to take the reins, it’s a glimmer of hope. The case offers the hard-drinking, lovelorn widower (who’s also recovering from an opium addiction) a chance to reestablish his worth—never mind that the Chief’s reasoning is “you have a weakness for our native friends, and besides, Lord Taggart believes you’re a half-competent, if somewhat unreliable, detective.” Then Suren returns to Calcutta to ask for Sam’s urgent assistance finding his cousin. A gently bred Brahmin who defied her upbringing to become a trailblazing (and controversial) female photographer, Sushmita Chatterjee has disappeared in frightening and violent circumstances. When the two men go to her studio to investigate, they barely escape flaming bottles hurled through the window. Though the men are wary of each other after their protracted separation, they can’t resist teaming up, which is a good call as these two cases aren’t as separate as they initially look—much like British and Indian lives in the Raj. Through Sam’s and Suren’s perspectives, The Burning Grounds artfully blends socially and politically astute insight, a noir focus on the underdog embroiled in life’s underbelly, and dry, world-weary irony. (Observing the corpse, Sam thinks, “J. P. Mullick’s career, however, much like his windpipe, had been tragically severed.”) Sam’s ambivalence about his adoptive country sharply illuminates Calcutta in the twilight of colonial rule, where “lines, designed to divide by race, each day would blur and fray and buckle a little . . . this bastard city . . . was the most wondrous flowering of that tolerance. I still hated it though.” With writing as striking as the plot twists, it’s an intoxicating brew.