The feeling of being there. It’s something that crops up a lot in reviews of books by Abir Mukherjee. In his mystery series featuring Sam Wyndham and Surendranath Banerjee, you’ll feel like you’re right there with these two detectives as they unpick horrible murders on the streets of Calcutta back in the 1920s.
With The Burning Grounds, the sixth novel in the series, the author cements that sense of place early on. The body of the wealthy Indian entrepreneur JP Mullick is found – throat sliced – at the Burning Ghats, the famous riverside site where Hindu cremation rituals take place and a key part of Bengali culture. But his corpse hasn’t been brought here by his family for the funeral pyre, it’s been dumped by whomever killed him.
Wyndham is called in by his superiors to investigate. He’s been in their bad books thanks to events in previous novels in the series. Not without two tablespoons of cynicism, he takes on the case with some relish. Finally, a distraction from the scotch, cigarettes and small talk that have kept him going over the months since he was last trusted with anything serious.
It won’t be easy. Although Mullick was famous for his wealth and his good deeds, which projected a social conscience, on a personal level he wasn’t well liked. Not by his family. Not by his employees. Not by his business partners. But who hated him enough to do this?
Meanwhile, Suren Banerjee has returned from a grand tour in Europe – Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London… He is back in the city of his birth, but is downbeat and lovelorn. While away experiencing the salons of the Continent, he fell in love. However, his father quashed any plans to marry the white woman he met over there. Race, religion, custom – they’d all get in the way.
More immediately, Suren has another problem. His cousin, Dolly, has gone missing. She might just be the only female photographer in Calcutta, but now she’s gone and the Banerjee family are extremely worried about her. So he goes to Sam and asks for help. It’s a frosty reunion, the two old friends know each other so well but don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye anymore. Still, you’ll get the feeling they’re pleased to be working together again, even if Suren is no longer a policeman and has a stronger-than-ever commitment to Bengali independence.
Our two different victims give author Abir Mukherjee all kinds of new vectors with which to explore the layers of society in colonial West Bengal. And Suren and Sam get the chance to waltz with the very top layer, because Estelle Morgan, the rising star of the silver screen, is in town. She’s been filming as part of a project bankrolled by the murdered JP Mullick – the beginnings of Bollywood, in a sense. As well as catching Sam Wyndham’s eye, she and her agent could be witnesses in the case.
Soon, Suren and Sam are on the train, heading in country to find out more about the production — and it’s during this journey that another murder occurs. If that wasn’t enough, when they go to Dolly’s studio to look for clues, they find it ransacked and the place is set on fire. Both cases need urgent action, and it’s clear more lives are in danger.
The author’s hugely successful standalone, Hunted, was one of our top reads in 2024 and won all sorts of awards last year. However, it was a big departure from historical crime fiction and it’s wonderful to be back in touch with Wyndham and Banerjee. There is a period in the middle of this story when there’s a little too much to-ing and fro-ing, which makes the book feel overlong, but being able to traverse the city with these odd-couple cops is a pleasure. They’ll chase suspects down the gullees and backstreets, savour (or not) the smells at every corner, and occasionally kick their heels in the halls of colonial officialdom.
Particularly enjoyable are the scenes when Estelle Morgan drags Sam up out of the urban environment and into Calcutta’s high society. They even run across his old flame, Annie Grant, who’s now hooked up with a Russian aristocrat exiled by the Great Patriotic War, leaving Sam grinding his teeth. More whisky. There’s a touch of Great Gatsby decadence here, adding another sparkling facet to the sense of place I was going on about.
With overlapping mysteries, characters we love that continue to develop with each new novel, plenty of peril in the final quarter of the book and an outstanding rendering of the setting, The Burning Grounds was easily one of my top reads in 2025. If you love historical crime fiction, you can’t go wrong with this one.
Also see Moscow Underground by Catherine Merridale. A very different setting but also expertly drawn.
Harvill Secker
Print/Kindle/iBook
£8.99
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
