November, 1921. Edward VIII, Prince of Wales and future ruler of India, is arriving in Bombay to begin a fourmonth tour. The Indian subcontinent is chafing under British rule, and Bombay solicitor Perveen Mistry isn’t surprised when local unrest over the royal arrival spirals into riots. But she’s horrified by the death of Freny Cuttingmaster, an eighteen-year-old female Parsi student, who falls from a second-floor gallery just as the prince’s grand procession is passing by her college.
Freny had come for a legal consultation just days before her death, and what she confided makes Perveen suspicious that her death was not an accident. Feeling guilty for failing to have helped Freny in life, Perveen steps forward to assist Freny’s family in the fraught dealings of the coroner’s inquest. When Freny’s death is ruled a murder, Perveen knows she can’t rest until she sees justice done. But Bombay is erupting: as armed British secret service march the streets, rioters attack anyone with perceived British connections and desperate shopkeepers destroy their own wares so they will not be targets of racial violence. Can Perveen help a suffering family when her own is in danger?
Sujata Massey is the author of fourteen novels, two novellas and numerous short stories that have been published in eighteen countries. Born in England to parents from India and Germany, Sujata was raised primarily in St. Paul, Minnesota, although her home for almost thirty years has been Baltimore, Maryland. She earned a B.A. in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and wrote features for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper before becoming a novelist.
The Perveen Mistry Series:
The Widows of Malabar Hill (2018)
The Satapur Moonstone (2019)
The Bombay Prince (2021)
Inspired in part by the woman who made history as India’s first female attorney, The Widows of Malabar Hill is a richly wrought story of multicultural 1920s Bombay as well as the debut of a sharp and promising new sleuth.
Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father’s law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a legal education from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes women’s legal rights especially important to her.
Mistry Law has been appointed to execute the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen examines the paperwork, she notices something strange: all three of the wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity. What will they live on? Perveen is suspicious, especially since one of the widows has signed her form with an X—meaning she probably couldn’t even read the document. The Farid widows live in full purdah—in strict seclusion, never leaving the women’s quarters or speaking to any men. Are they being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous guardian? Perveen tries to investigate, and realizes her instincts were correct when tensions escalate to murder. Now it is her responsibility to figure out what really happened on Malabar Hill, and to ensure that no innocent women or children are in further danger.
India, 1922: It is rainy season in the lush, remote Satara mountains southeast of Bombay, where the kingdom of Satapur is tucked away. A curse seems to have fallen upon Satapur’s royal family, whose maharaja died of a sudden illness shortly before his teenage son was struck down in a tragic accident. The kingdom is now ruled by an agent of the British Raj on behalf of Satapur’s two maharanis, the dowager queen and the maharaja’s widow.
The royal ladies are in dispute over the education of the young crown prince, and a lawyer’s council is required—but the maharanis live in purdah and do not speak to men. Just one person can help them: Perveen Mistry, India’s only female lawyer. Perveen is determined to bring peace to the royal house and make a sound recommendation for the young prince’s future, but knows she is breaking a rule by traveling alone as a woman into the remote countryside. And she arrives to find that the Satapur palace is full of cold-blooded power plays and ancient vendettas. Too late, she realizes she has walked into a trap. But whose? And how can she protect the royal children from the palace’s deadly curse?
Perveen Mistry, the smart heroine of Sujata Massey’s popular mystery series set in 1920s Bombay (now Mumbai), has her roots in an actual person: Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954), who studied law at the University of Oxford and became India’s first female attorney.
I never read this genre. I never read mysteries on purpose…
Catching up on all ARC reading at our local bookshop this book fell into my lap to read after the lovely owner dropped a stack of books to read to me. Beautiful cover, 1920s, Bombay and a female lead enticed me in to read it.
Prince of Bombay. This novel is about Perveen getting involved in a sensitive situation when the Prince of Wales visits Bombay in November 1921, which is something that he actually did do.
I enjoyed this read very much while having tea and recovering from my vaccine. I put on hold the first two books at my local library. I don’t actually generally read series either. Ha. You never know where a book can take you!
