Well. Vaseem Khan writes a good pacey yarn, with engaging characters: I'm quite happy for the baddies to be very very bad, because the goodies are not always very very good. Our heroine, Persis, the only female Police Inspector in 1950s India is flawed indeed - headstrong and gauche in equal measure, but we root for her anyway. I very much enjoy this glimpse of life in post-Colonial India, where the undeniable failings of the British are at risk of being replicated by the new Indian elite. This time, Persis has been charged with re-opening the case of an Englishman going to the gallows for the murder of an Indian lawyer and activist. And she has to work quickly and with little backing and support: this man will die soon, and it would be no good discovering that he's innocent once he's dead. Excitement mounts. But. And for me it's a big but. Crisis follows crisis. Persis finds herself in impossible situations time after time. And time after time, improbably provident rescue arrives just at the very last moment. It all gets just a bit too frenetic. Nevertheless, this is a dashing story, a good involving read. Just ... maybe put the brakes on a little bit, Vaseem Khan? Oh, and - let's avoid a spoiler alert. Don't let that letter which Persis writes at the very end of the book get delivered. Please. ( )

Persis Wadia, first female police inspector in India, is asked by Additional Deputy Commissioner Amit Shukla to look into the circumstances surrounding the murder of an Indian lawyer, for which a rich white man, James Whitby, has been tried and convicted. Whitby is due to be executed for the crime, although he insists that he is innocent, but Shukla thinks that a discreet re-examination of the case might be helpful. Persis’s investigation takes her to Calcutta and another murder some years past, and the more she discovers there, the less she understands the case…. This is the fourth and latest installment in the Malabar House series, and like its predecessors, it includes a lot of Indian history, primarily of the period before, during and just after Partition. Persis seems to have matured a bit since the last book, but her impulsiveness still results in grave danger for herself and others. I missed some of the regular characters such as her father (who is away on his honeymoon) and Archie (who only shows up late in the story), but it was nice to see her coming to a better understanding of and with her cousin Darius. The book ends on a cliffhanger - will she or won’t she? - which I hope means that Book 5 will be coming along soon as this reader really wants to know the answer to that question! Recommended - but start at the beginning of the series, please! ( )

Inspector Persis Wadia wants nothing to do with taking a look into the case of convicted killer James Whitby. India was controlled by British "justice" for hundreds of years. Surely, turnabout is fair play? But higher-ups in the Bombay Police and the government realize that, if no one makes sure that Whitby is really guilty, then they are no better than the whites who ruled them for so long. Besides, if anything goes pear-shaped, who better to put in charge of the investigation than the only woman on the police force, the woman everyone wishes would just disappear? Persis is the perfect scapegoat.

Author Vaseem Khan continues his enthralling Malabar House historical series with this fourth book, Death of a Lesser God. He never fails to enlighten me about the history of the area, be it India's fight for independence, the gut-wrenching Partition riots, or the horrific Bengali Famine of 1943. This fourth book centers on a sensitive subject: ensuring that the former white oppressors receive justice even though they did not dispense it themselves when they were in power. And... how can you scream at someone to GO HOME when they were born in India? "How can I go back to a place I've never been?" says more than one white character.

Inspector Persis Wadia is led by an overwhelming ambition to succeed in a career where she's not wanted. She is so convinced of her mission that she blindly puts others in danger. Fortunately, Persis realizes these deadly traits and knows she has to fight them. Watching her character struggle and develop is one of the strengths of this series. She must also deal with a personal learning curve when she's put in charge of mentoring Seema, a young woman who wants more for herself than a life in abject poverty. Fortunately, the love triangle Khan has created isn't taking center stage in the story, since I've never cared for those. However, the triangle does highlight a cultural difficulty. Life would be much easier if Persis accepted her Aunty Nussie's choice of Darius. Her strong attraction to white Archie Blackfinch could be much more dangerous.

As compelling as the story is, I did have a couple of problems with it. There was a bit of deus ex machina at the end with various elements popping up just in time to save the day. Although they had been mentioned tangentially beforehand, their timing was so impeccable that I couldn't resist a tiny eye roll. In addition, similes run amok through most of the book. Now I love a good simile, but when I start counting them, it's not a favorable sign. But those two small complaints aside, Death of a Lesser God is a good addition to Persis Wadia's story. I'm looking forward to what she does next. ( )

This is the fourth in the Malabar House series with Inspector Persis Wadia, the first female police officer in India. Of course, she is hidden away in the backwaters of police stations, Malabar House, but has a knack of being asked to investigate high profile cases, possibly to try and bring her down but also because she is good, if a little naive, at her job.

Set in the 1950s, post partition, the lesser god is James Whitby, the son of a ruthless businessman, who is accused of murdering a lawyer. He is found guilty and due to hang but the complication is that he is a White English man, and the lawyer is Indian. So, one of the big questions in the book is whether an English man can receive justice in post-colonial India and it is a close call.

The search for the truth takes Persis and her apprentice, Seema, from Bombay to Calcutta on the trail of the motivations for the killing. Complicating matters is what appears to be a star of David sent to the lawyer not long before he was killed. This means moving amongst the many religious groups in India, Jews being one of them. However, what symbols might mean to westerners is not necessarily what they mean to Indians and this drives one of the wrong turns that Persis takes on her search.

In India, symbols endured. From the calcified remains of Christian saints, to the soaring architecture of Muslim conquerors, to innumerable Hindu pilgrimage sites dotted around the place, to the rumours that Jesus had once walked the mountains of Kashmir - presumably in something more than a sackcloth robe - religion had left behind stories that twisted and flapped through the populace, attaching themselves to susceptible minds.
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Interspersed throughout the story are first person accounts of James Whitby's life, I think to show us how his upbringing and life as the son of a man who believes that Indians are subordinate to an Englishman and that they are lazy and need beating in order to get anything done, have shaped him. Slowly, they detail his change in thinking from going along with his father's beliefs to determining his own.

My identity is not up for debate. I am a white man and I am an Indian. A strange bird, but this is my forest and if I am to fly, then it shall be here.
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At a couple of crucial moments Persis and Seema are saved by rather unbelievable events - a tiger kills one person and a crocodile eats another. Whether these are meant to be representatives of the Gods, invoked by the Gods or just rather convenient ways of allowing Persis to investigate another day, I don't know. Whichever way, they didn't quite work.

As the epigraph says, when asked whether you are a man or a demon, the answer is that you are a human being. Good and evil reside in all of us, it's just which one wins the day. ( )