The Village of Widows

When a diplomat at the Madagascan embassy in Delhi is stabbed to death in mysterious and quite possibly scandalous circumstances, the ambassador calls upon his old friend Jay Samorin to help find the murderer as quickly and discreetly as possible. In his somewhat unorthodox approach to solving crimes, Samorin crosses swords with the police officer put in charge of the investigation, Deputy Commissioner Anna Khan, recently transferred from Kashmir where her zealous pursuit of suspected terrorists threatened to cause uproar. But it transpires that each has an intensely personal reason for their obsession with evil: Samorin's father, a pilot and war hero, was hanged for the murder of his mother, while Anna's husband was killed by the Kashmiri Mujahadeen. Forming an uneasy alliance, the gifted amateur and jaded professional begin to untangle a shocking web of corruption, prostitution and callous medical malpractice. The trail they follow is fraught with danger, tainted by the older, deeper mysteries that lie outside the more traditional boundaries of a criminal investigation - a trail that leads back through the darker recesses of their own lives to the elusive, haunted place they call the village of widows...