Authors: Barbara Cleverly
ISBN-13: 9780440242239, ISBN-10: 0440242231
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Date Published: October 2004
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Barbara Cleverly is the author of nine novels of historical suspense, including The Damascened Blade, winner of the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award, The Last Kashmiri Rose, Ragtime in Simla, The Palace Tiger, The Bee’s Kiss, Tug of War, An Old Magic and The Tomb of Zeus. She lives in Cambridge, England where she is now at work on the newest Joe Scandilands novel, Folly du Jour.
World War I hero and Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands is traveling to Simla, summer capital of the British Raj, when he is thrust abruptlyand bloodilyinto his second case of serial murder: His traveling companion, a Russian opera singer, is shot dead at his side in the Governor of Bengal’s touring car at a crossroads known as Devil’s Elbow. Like Cleverly’s award-winning and enthusiastically reviewed The Last Kashmiri Rose, which debuted Sandilands, Ragtime in Simla effectively combines exotic settings with high suspense in a deftly plotted tale of 1920s India. At Simla, in the pine-scented Himalayan hills, the English colonials have re-created a bit of home with half-timbered houses, glittering dinner tables, amateur theatricals, and gymkhanas. But when Joe’s murder investigation turns up an identical unsolved killing a year earlier, he begins to uncover behind the close-knit community’s sparkling facade a sinister trail of blackmail, vice, and deadly secrets.
In Cleverly's treatment, the unpredictable Alice is indeed enchanting, not to mention dangerous. Between the natural beauty of the setting and the seductiveness of the women, it's a wonder that Joe gets out of Simla with heart and mind intact. Marilyn Stasio