Enjoyable mystery with historical, cultural, and international highlights. A good start on an interesting main character and setting.

Huzzah! An enticing historical crime novel!

The understated discourse by Captain Sam Wyndham is up there with the best of them.
In the opening page Wyndham's statement sets the tone, "When you think you’ve seen it all, it’s nice to find that a killer can still surprise you." A British official has been murdered, a threatening note stuffed in his mouth addressed to the overlords, the crown raj.
It's 1919, post the war. Captain Wyndham, formerly of Scotland Yard has taken a posting in Calcutta.
He displays a certain jaundiced attitude covering an inner Boy Scout hopefulness.
Up against corruption, home grown terrorists (fighters for home rule and independence from Britain), Wyndham's introductory case is that of this official murdered in an alley in the more sordid parts of the city. In a place he should not have been! And it happens outside a brothel!
The trail will take Wyndham from the heights of government, to the most powerful businessmen in the country,and to H Division's Secret Service headquarters, into to the very bowels of the bazaar and the squalor therein.
Accompanied by his new sidekicks, the quite unpleasant Inspector Digby and wonderfully understated Sergeant Surrender-not Banerjee. The conversations between these three are truly the stuff of the past. Delivered in such an understated fashion, I just laughed at so many places, when my jaw wasn't dropping.
I am so hooked!

A NetGalley ARC

Intelligent historical fiction with a cunning mystery and two engaging main characters. Fans of Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown will be equally enthralled by this portrait of the British Raj after WWI. Definitely will be looking for the next entry in this serkes

A murder mystery with a noir-ish feel, set in 1919 Calcutta. Our main character and narrator is Sam Wyndham, ex-Scotland Yard detective and WWI veteran, newly recruited to boost the investigative skills of the police in Calcutta. On Sam's arrival, he is greeted with the body of a white man dressed in black tie, found in an alley in a "native" neighborhood behind a brothel. This at first seems to be a simple case of robbery or scandalous sex gone wrong, but expands to become a conspiracy involving the highest political and economic levels of the British Raj.

The depiction of historical Calcutta is detailed and fascinating, but Sam himself is, alas, less interesting. He's a mystery hero cliche in several ways: the dead wife, the addiction (morphine this time instead of the usual alcoholism, at least), the attempt at hard-boiled writing:
I coughed as the stench clawed at my throat. In a few hours the smell would be unbearable; strong enough to turn the stomach of a Calcutta fishmonger. I pulled out a packet of Capstans, tapped out a cigarette, lit it and inhaled, letting the sweet smoke purge my lungs. Death smells worse in the tropics. Most things do.
[...]
Still, I’d seen worse.
Finally there was the note. A bloodstained scrap of paper, balled up and forced into his mouth like a cork in a bottle. That was an interesting touch, and a new one to me. When you think you’ve seen it all, it’s nice to find that a killer can still surprise you.

It's not bad, it's just a pallid imitation of much better writers. Though to be fair to Mukherjee, there were occasional passages that made me laugh:
Four storeys high and about two hundred yards long, with massive plinths and huge columns topped off with statues of the gods. Not Indian gods, of course. These ones were Greek, or possibly Roman. I never could tell the difference.
That was the thing about Calcutta. Everything we’d built here was in the classical style. And everything was larger than necessary. Our offices, mansions and monuments all shouted, Look at our works! Truly we are the inheritors of Rome.
It was the architecture of domination.
It all seemed faintly absurd. The Palladian buildings with their columns and pediments, the toga-clad statues of Englishmen long deceased, and the Latin inscriptions on everything from palaces to public lavatories. Looking at it all, a stranger could be forgiven for thinking that Calcutta had been colonised by Italians rather than Englishmen.

Sam's character is thin and inconsistent. He's sometimes on the side of the Indians, sometimes on the side of the British. Such flip-flopping could be an astute characterization of a basically decent man reluctant to lose his own privilege, but that's not the case here; it's just messy. He knows way too much about Indian culture, languages, and history for a dude who supposedly arrived in the country days ago. His treatment of the one important female character is sexist and leering (though I am fairly certain that's from Sam's view and not Mukherjee's, but either way it makes me reluctant to spend more time with the character).

The mystery is well-done and several secondary characters are appealing, but ultimately I didn't enjoy it enough to continue with the series.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2085837797

What originally caught my eye about this book was that it was the winner of the Harvill Secker/Daily Telegraph crime writing competition. I love reading stories by debut authors, and this one hit in multiple categories: international (set in India), historical (set in April 1919, with the Amritsar Massacre occurring in the middle of the plot), and a detective driven mystery/crime novel. Captain Sam Wyndham was flawed, yet heroic...the perfect template for an honorable, but slightly broken man. The writing was atmospheric. Right away I was transported to Calcutta...to the heat, to the tension, to the beauty and the struggle. The language used even favored phrases of the time. This was a very interesting time in India's history, still known as the British Indian Empire, set almost 30 years before gaining independence from the British. Sam is new to India and almost immediately gets caught up in the murder of a Sahib. What I really enjoyed, was not only that the story was well-written, but that the dialog was clever...there were several times that I got caught off guard and let out a laugh at the most unexpected times. This was a brilliant debut and I look forward to reading this author again.
I received a copy of this title from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

When I first picked up A Rising Man and began to read, I read it as I would any other historical mystery. I soon fell headfirst into a major roadblock: the slow-as-treacle pace. Fortunately, before I gave up and moved to another book, I realized that the setting of this book is absolutely fabulous and well worth the price of admission.

Mukherjee has written this book in such a way that readers get to see Calcutta in 1919 from several different points of view. It is a city-- and a country-- just beginning its quest for freedom in earnest. The vast majority of Indians do not wish to be a part of the British Raj. There are revolutionaries showing us why India wants its freedom. There are British bureaucrats who-- above all else-- wish to maintain their precarious status quo. There are Indians like Sergeant Banerjee who want the British out but want to learn how to govern and how to fight crime first. And into this mix comes Sam Wyndham, who's survived a long meat-grinder of a war with few illusions left. He's fought side by side with brave and honorable men of all races and creeds, so he doesn't always see situations from his superiors' points of view. And speaking of points of view, there are several that some readers may find uncomfortable.

Once I settled down to read this book as historical fiction rather than as a mystery, I was much happier. Yes, the mystery is a good one, and Sam Wyndham is a finely drawn character, but it is the city of Calcutta that steals the show. I'm looking forward to Abir Mukherjee's next book with a great deal of interest.