The Tower of Silence by Gyan Prakash

Book #44 - 2013

Summary from Harper Collins website:

"A long-lost Sexton Blake mystery, 1920s detective fiction at its best

Historian Gyan Prakash of Princeton University stumbled upon part of the unpublished manuscript of Tower of Silence by Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chevalier (or Chaiwala, as he called himself) in the British Library. After scouring several Mumbai libraries, he found the missing pages.

It is a thrilling tale that begins on a blistering April afternoon in Poona with the click of a camera shutter. An aerial photograph is taken from a small aircraft flying directly over the Tower of Silence. The Zorastrian community is thrown into turmoil and horrified grief at this heinous act.

Beram, a suave wealthy man who drives around in a Rolls Royce but is a devout Parsi, decides to exact revenge. Thus begins a sensational cat-and-mouse game between Beram and Sexton Blake, England’s most famous detective."

The biggest "mystery" in connection with this book, was the original author "Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chevalier Chaiwala" himself. The book itself, was quite amateurish, with some supernatural phenomenon and detective tricks which were quite a bore, in search of a better word, a search I am not willing to conduct for the purpose of writing this review. The book was very racist, but the racism was so obvious and oversold, that it was more amusing than annoying. A forgettable read.