India, 1951. After wilfully ignoring orders from her superiors, Persis Wadia, India's first female police detective, has been exiled from Bombay to the wild and mountainous state of Nagaland.As India's first post-Independence election looms, and tensions rise across the country, Persis finds herself banished to the Victoria Hotel, a crumbling colonial-era relic, her career in ruins. But when a prominent local politician is murdered in his locked room at the Victoria Hotel, his head missing - a case appears quite literally on her doorstep. As the political situation threatens to explode into all-out havoc, Persis has only days to stop a killer operating at the very edge of darkness... The sixth rip-roaring thriller in the award-winning Malabar House novels and a perfect entry point to the series.