Review: Death in the East

Death in the East by Abir Mukherjee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

DEATH IN THE EAST is the fourth, and possibly the best to date, in Abir Mukherjee’s Raj-set Wyndham and Banerjee mysteries. The story alternates between 1922 India and 1905 London as Sam Wyndham, who, in an attempt to finally kick the opium addiction with which he has struggled through the previous three books in the series, has travelled to an ashram in remote Assam. An event on the way causes him to recall the earlier events when, as an inexperienced and rash bobby on the East End beat he investigated a violent attack on, and subsequent murder of, a young woman of his acquaintance.
In truth the two narratives initially seem unconnected and the intriguing 1905 London mystery feels a little broken up by the 1922 story of Sam’s ‘cure’ but around the two thirds mark the stories collide in startling fashion and the novel resolves very satisfyingly. Along the way there are chillingly atmospheric meetings in crime-ridden, dark London backstreets, two locked-room puzzles, an Agatha Christie-like examination of suspects and a significant change in the relationship between Captain Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee.
As in previous novels, Mukherjee comments on the racism, the subtle and unconscious as well as the overt, of the English, particularly of the upper classes, against those who are ‘different’ be it the Jewish immigrant population in London or the native Indian ‘blithely dismissing the fact that this was his country and we were the foreigners in it.’ Unfortunately, things are not noticeably different a century later.

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