Bribery, Corruption Also Book

This much-loved series about a Bombay police inspector has survived the opinion of some readers that the Peter Sellers-ish idiom of the hero is a bit patronizing. The reason is perhaps the solid embattled decency of Keating's Inspector Ghote--his occasional failures to get things quite right and his dignity and diligence give the books a charm that outweighs the faded joke of his fractured English. Here he is, as occasionally before, a fish out of water--his Bengali wife has inherited a house and small fortune in Calcutta, and he is faced with the awful prospect of leaving his hometown for good. And, of course, there are dirty doings involved--the lawyer who Mrs. Ghote's late uncle trusted is pursuing agendas of his own, and, wherever they turn in this strange town, they are liable to find themselves deceived and betrayed. They wander around Calcutta, seeing its sights and meeting a rogue's gallery of the untrustworthy and villainous; and their occasional personal lapses rebound on them in awful ways. A bleakly funny book, this is a cry of despair about the abandonment of old ways, in which the puzzles and the adventures are secondary.--Roz KaveneyRead More