What a pleasure to read The Satapur Moonstone after a sluggish start to the year with some rather less engaging reads. This is the second of a series of three books based on cases investigated by the fictional Perveen Mistry, the first female lawyer in Bombay. Like the other two novels, it has been well researched and delightfully written, so as to immerse the reader into 1920s pre-independence India.

I have commented in previous posts that Sujata Massey is somewhat like an Indian version of Agatha Christie. In this particular novel, her writing evokes a subcontinental Willkie Collins. In this particular whodunnit, instead of being set in Bombay, we see Perveen sent out to the remote mountainous princely kingdom of Satapur, to resolve a conflict between its two maharanis, the mother and grandmother of the young crown prince, whose education they disagree over. The local agent for the British Raj, Colin Sandringham, has engaged Perveen after being unable to meet with the maharanis himself, since they live under strict purdah in their royal palaces within the forests. Apart from the matter of whether the crown prince should be educated at home or abroad, Perveen, our lawyer turned detective, becomes increasingly suspicious of the circumstances under which the prince’s father and older brother have both come to untimely deaths.

Now I have read all three of the series, I look forward to the next instalment.