Hugo Frencham was the consummate British civil servant. A bit dull, perhaps, a bit fussily fastidious. But in the right position, even dullness can be a virtue. And as Her Majesty’s “Head of Chancery” in India, Frencham was the ideal man to make up the numbers at a diplomatic dinner party, keep the junior officers in line, and represent solid British values in Delhi.

Indeed, Frencham’s life was such a model of propriety that its two areas of untidiness stood out in startling relief. One, certainly, was his death: Diplomats do not tend to be found in bloody heaps, furiously stabbed with antique ritual daggers. Nor do they tend to amass priceless collections of Tibetan artifacts or bulging bank accounts. Had Frencham been smuggling? Spying? Clearly he had been up to something untoward, and George Sinclair is sent off to Delhi to find out what it was and – ideally – sweep it all under an ornate Indian rug. Back in London, this seemed like a relatively straightforward task. But once in India, Sinclair soon realizes that nothing about the dull, eternally correct Hugo Frencham was straightforward. And he realizes as well that he’s going to need a very big rug.

“This intriguing first novel is imbued with such sheer intelligence that it outweighs the work of many more practiced writers”
—The Telegraph (UK)

“A really excellent first novel, with unusual and interesting characters, great atmosphere, and a genuine surprise in the tail”
—Times Literary Supplement (UK)