A while back I was very much in the mood for a nice cozy mystery and decided to finally give Barbara Cleverly's series set in 1920s India a try. The period was right and this had the added bonus of an exotic (not to mention warm!) setting, so I picked up The Last Kashmiri Rose the first Joe Sandilands mystery. It languished a bit as I set to work tying up loose ends in my reading, but now that I'm on vacation I thought it time to dedicate a few hours to finishing it and finally discovering the identity of the murderer.
There's an interesting story behind the series. The author came across an old trunk in her attic filled with family memorabilia including photos of a long lost relative. The man was a great-uncle of her husband's who was a Brigadier and spent many years in India. Along with photos there were reminiscences (the relative being an "elegant writer") of a vanished India. This gave Cleverly the inspiration for her Detective Sandilands, and in this series she dramatizes the life of the original Brigadier Sandilands.
As for the fictional counterpart Detective Joe Sandilands is an interesting character. Basically on loan from Scotland Yard Joe Sandilands is nearly at the end of "six months' secondment from the Met to the Bengal Police" when he's asked to stay and work on a troubling case. Handsome and gentlemanly he was raised in the north of England on the borderlands and was training at the Bar when the Great War broke out. After witnessing the harrowing carnage of the battlefields he decided he could do more good for his men training as a detective rather than returning to the Bar.
It's a messy case he's offered. A particularly gruesome death of the wife of a Bengal Grey officer turns out not to be suicide as first thought. The victim was found in her bath, her wrists slit nearly to the bone, yet there appears to be no sign of forced entry or easy exit. As well the crime scene has been gawked at and compromised by half the residents of the British station passing through for a look. The victim isn't the first wife to meet with a nasty death. Several other wives before the war also died in curious circumstances, possibly accidents, but there are too many coincidences for this last death to be ignored. It's hoped that Joe, with his new methods of investigation, can solve the mysteries of these deaths, some more than a decade old.
I don't know much about the British Raj, so I can't account for the accuracy of the setting. Certainly there was an exoticism to the locale--the houses, the dusty roads, the summer heat, the colonial attitudes and lifestyle of the officers and their wives. The story centers very much on the Anglo-Indian version of life and one character notes to Joe that he isn't seeing the "real India" as life on the station, where this elite corps of British cavalrymen live, is more British than Britain. There are occasional glances of the "real India" though, so I suspect this is something that will be fleshed out more in later books.
As entertaining reads go, I did enjoy this mystery, but it was lacking in some way. I'm not sure I can explain why or what it was that seemed to be missing. It may simply be the case of a first book in a series and people and places aren't necessarily as developed as I would have liked. Maybe it just didn't feel as fully dimensional as I wanted it to be. I could visualize it, but only to a point. It wasn't quite as vivid as I had hoped it would be (something I was expecting with an Indian setting). However, as far as the mystery goes, it was fairly well plotted and had some nice twists. I wasn't shocked by the culprit, but satisfied the conclusion. I'm curious about the series and plan on reading more, and I find Joe an interesting character and one I expect to be expanded upon. He's a bit of a playboy, and not what I expected when I first started reading and maybe that's my biggest draw along with learning more about Britain's role in India's history during this period.
I'm sticking to the 1920s, though I'll be moving back to Britain as I pick up Charles Todd's A Duty to the Dead next (one from my vacation pile).