Hachette India

Stroke of Death

Shampa Roy

The year is 1904 and there's a storm brewing on the horizon...

Nothing ever disturbs the quaint idyll of the village Rajapur. That is, until one day, a young widow is discovered bludgeoned to death, flies swarming over her corpse.

Called in to investigate, Bansidhar, the local daroga, is at his wits' end about this grisly murder, further complicated by the slain woman's ties to the most important household in the village – the Rajbari.

Inspector Dhananjoy Lahiri has just arrived at his friend Bansidhar's for a break from work, but he can't stop himself from being drawn to the gruesome case.

As the duo begins to dig deep into the victim's life and her relationships with the people she worked for, they discover that the Rajbari residents are hiding secrets of their own.

With the clock ticking, will the two of them be able to find the killer before tragedy strikes again?

Shampa Roy

Shampa Roy has taught in the Dept. of English, Miranda House, University of Delhi for over three decades. Her academic writings – articles, book chapters and translations – have appeared in various international journals and edited anthologies. She has co-edited and contributed to Towards Freedom: Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore's Ghare Baire/The Home and the World and 'Bad' Women of Bombay Films. She is also the author of Gender and Criminality in Bangla Crime Narratives and True Crime Writings in Colonial India. Stroke of Death is her first novel.