Synopsis When a diplomat at the Madagascan Embassy in Delhi is stabbed to death in mysterious and quite possibly scandalous circumstances, the ambassador calls upon his old friend Jay Samorin to help find the murderer as quickly and discreetly as possible. In his somewhat unorthodox approach to solving crimes, Samorin crosses swords with the police officer in charge of the investigation, Deputy Commissioner Anna Khan, recently transferred from Kashmir where her zealous pursuit of suspected terrorists had threatened to cause an uproar. But it transpires that each has an intensely personal reason for their obsession with murder: Samorin's father, a pilot and war hero, was hanged for the murder of his mother, while Anna Khan's husband was killed by the Kashmiri Mujahadeen. Forming an uneasy alliance, the gifted amateur and the jaded professional start to untangle a shocking web of corruption, prostitution and callous medical malpractice. It is a train fraught with danger, tainted by the older, deeper mysteries that lie outside the more tangible boundaries of a criminal investigation--a trail leading back through the darkest recesses of their own lives to that elusive, haunted place known as the Village of widows.