The Dying Day Vaseem Khan
Hodder & Stoughton £16.99
Khan’s splendid heroine, Persis Wadia, Bombay’s first female detective, returns for a second adventure. It’s 1948 and an English academic has disappeared from the city’s Asiatic Society, bearing with him a fabulously rare original copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy. What follows is a thoroughly enjoyable yarn, complete with atmospheric setting, intricate puzzle-solving and much derring-do, as Persis cracks codes, battles ex-Nazis and struggles with her increasingly tangled love life.