This is a long book and it seems longer,  but like so many novels of India it is immersive with loads of background and history.  It’s also a debut novel but won the 1st Crime Novel Award given by Minotaur books and Mystery Writers of America last year.  

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Murder in Old Bombay
by Ne March 
Read by Vikas Adam 16h 2m
Rating 7.5  / historical fiction/mystery 
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Jim Agnihotri is a badly wounded captain in the Anglo-Indian forces who leaves the hospital where he’s been reading the new Sherlock Holmes novels.  The year is 1892.  He also reads the newspapers and becomes interested in a the double suicide of two young women in Bombay.  He writes to the husband of one of the women and then goes to personally investigate their “suicides.” The reports in the newspapers have been laden with inconsistencies.  And therein lies the origins and crux of the tale.

 Jim gets involved with the powerful Parsee families of the deceased girls and his investigations take him to other cities and adventures which involve befriending several children along the way.  So the investigation gets delayed and turns dangerous and the book turns into a thriller at times. Meanwhile he falls in love with Diana, a close relative of one of the deceased women.

There are some problems – he’s half native Indian and half English, and his native Indianness is not the right kind for Diana’s family. But first he has to solve the mystery of the girls’ deaths have a few adventues and then he can become really invovled with Dian.  The book turns into an adventure romance.  I’m not fond of romance –