Our detective, Perveen Mistry, is one of the first women admitted to the bar in 1920s Bombay, and like most in the legal profession at the time, she's a Parsi: an ethnic Persian Zoroastrian. She has an advantage over her male colleagues: she can talk to women in purdah (cut off entirely from men outside their families). When the British government hires Perveen to investigate the welfare of a young maharajah in an princely state whose mother and grandmother are in purdah, she discovers that his elder brother may have been murdered. Will the young boy--or Perveen herself--be next? A fun and fascinating mystorical with a lot of plot elements going on.