Böcker av Kalpana Swaminathan

While returning from New Delhi, Sita, detective Lalli's niece and trustedsidekick, runs into former classmate Anais at the Mumbai airport. They catchup and Anais, before disappearing into the Mumbai crowd, hands over a shoebox she is carrying to a waiting woman, informing the lady that it contains herson's ashes. A few days later, Anais is found dead, floating in the slimy MithiRiver, a pink nylon cord wrapped ritually around her neck.What does the box full of ashes and bones have to do with Anais's murder?What is the significance of the peculiar knots round her neck?Lalli must find answers, fast, if she is to prevent more deaths.

Bombay, 1896. A handsome Indian Prince loses his heart to a Europeanwoman of striking beauty. She is staying at the only hotel fit for Europeans-Watson's, in the elite Kala Ghoda area of the city. The Prince gifts his ladylove a necklace of gold set with a beautiful sapphire of so deep a blue that itis known as the Kala Ghoda. But then Fate intervenes. An epidemic of theplague sweeps the city and the lady sets sail for Paris without even biddinggoodbye. Before her ship sails, she returns the Prince's gift through his groom,Madan. When the jewel case is opened, the necklace is there, but the sapphireis not. Madan is accused of the theft, and hanged. The Prince loses his ladyand, in years to come, his fortune.The sapphire appears to have fulfilled its prophecy-that it will bringmisfortune to anyone who possesses it. The groom is forever known as 'MadanChor', and the scandal follows his family for four generations.To find a jewel that has gone missing for 125 years seems an impossibletask-even for Lalli. She finds unexpected help in Jean Claude, the retiredChief of Police from Paris, who is here to investigate l'affaire du cheval noir-an investigation begun more than a century ago by Edmund Locard, thelegendary detective. It was Locard who was originally engaged to find thesapphire.It is up to Lalli and Jean Claude to finish the task Locard began. And, despitethe re-emergence of Lalli's old enemy, Rassiwala, and his evil designs-this iswhat they achieve. Not for nothing is Lalli, long retired, still the Last Resortfor the Mumbai Police.

While answering a distraught call from her friend Sitara, Sita, detective Lalli'sniece, discovers a body in an empty flat-a hulking salesman with his headbashed in. However, more than the crime, Sita finds herself distracted by aprint of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, which hangs in the living room.Why is the iconic Renaissance painting in a single colour? And what is itsconnection with the corpse on the living room floor?The Madonna seems hardly relevant to the police in their hunt for themurderer. But Lalli, the last resort for unsolvable crimes, thinks otherwise.

Lalli, retired policewoman, intrepid detective, collects curiosities… that inevitably lead to murder.The curiosity of murder unfolds in seven acts.Since Kalpana Swaminathan's first whodunit was published over ten years ago, Lalli-sixty and silver-haired and tough as nails-has been one of the most memorable detectives in Indian fiction. Lalli returns in this brilliant page-turner, a collection of seven stories, to solve some of the strangest, most complex cases of her career.The opening act, in which a face keeps reappearing until a crime committed long ago is revealed, is followed by a murder that could be hypothetical-or a reality (Lalli turns to Schrodinger's Cat to find out). In the third act in this unfolding drama, Lalli and Sita are invited to a book-burning which turns out to be murder most foul. And Lalli turns her skills to the world of high fashion when Sita sits next to a serial killer on a bus-but was he killer or victim?The aptly named Sucide Point in Bombay's suburbs, leads Lalli to a suicide that turns out to be something far more sinister. And an innocuous desk ornament is the clue to a crime most artistically executed. Finally, for connoisseurs of fiction, the curtains come down with a threnody for lost love.