Smoke and Ashes

I finished Smoke and Ashes. It was okay. No serial killer, which is a step; up. The plot became somewhat bland and circular by about the halfway point. Just the same elements rearranged or repeated, maybe with a slight facelift. There's also a writing style that is almost like continuity-errors. He makes small jumps in time or place and it can catch you off guard. I found myself having to re-read the previous page to get my bearings.

Okay, not great. Readable, but not fantastic. I've found another one of this guy's books at the local online library and I'll give that a try.

Sums up everything I have learned in 74 years.

I have checked out this book from my public library. They also have the first in the series, but someone else has it at the moment. 

I finished A Necessary Evil and will soon start another in the Banerjee series: Death in the East (book 4 of 5)

A Necessary Evil (perhaps I still don't understand how the title relates to the book) was a pretty good read throughout. But about 2/3 of the way through, the plot started to get stale as we simply rotated through five or six suspects and considered various scenarios. There were probably too many options made available, so my eyes started to glaze over a bit nearer the end.

Several of the scenarios or plot points were not convincing. A couple actions by Arora, in particular, seemed to turn him into a human MacGuffin. And the culmination of the murder mystery was underwhelming. But not underwhelming to the point where it spoiled it. But the plot simply lacked snap, crackle, and panache.

Also, the pining of Wyndam over the half-breed chick (I forget her name) was overdone. Also, they could have fleshed out the character of the second-in-line prince. Wyndam does have some good interactions with him (love the tiger hunt), but probably better to extend them than spend so many words speculating about who-done-it by sifting through various scenarios. As a reader, this don't work because we already know the plot is in the hands of the writer. So this sifting tends to do nothing to help suspend disbelief and to get lost in a novel.

Surrender-not definitely comes off more like a real character in this one. He was but a shadow of a person in Smoke and Ashes. And (blessedly) there are fewer of the cliched conflicts between Wyndam and his superiors. That kind of stuff was old 30 years ago.

So, overall, I found it a page-turner with only minor disappointments.

Cool! And that's an amazing station. No wonder the Indians wanted home rule. The wanted that railroad infrastructure.

Yeah, I understood all that. It just seemed a weak link to the title of the book. I might have called it "With all My Concubines, Who Really Needs a Bossy Wife?"



Yes, very well stated. A very weak plot point. The diamonds could have been a point of interesting intrigue. Instead it was kind of blah. By the time someone decides to investigate the mines, it's a day late and a dollar short as far as the story goes.



I thought Arora was a horrible and unnecessary character. Dittos on what you said. His delay in accosting Punit's assassin was when the novel took a definite down-turn for me. A silly, silly, silly plot point that they didn't build on and excused with flimsy after-the-fact speculation.



Ditto on all counts. Like I said, I thought Surrender-not might have been a little more developed here than the other book. But he's still underdeveloped. And the juvenile pining over Miss Grant would have been acceptable had he at least tried to change his behavior a little and win her over. But his destructive non-stop smart-ass-ism was dull and tiring.

We certainly read the same book. Given how difficult it is for me to find a book that is either not intellectually insulting nor full of political correctness, I sort of have to go with what I can find. And certainly I learn things about India in that time period which is a draw for me. A shame the characters aren't a little more well developed.

I've started book #4, Death in the East. This is the one the comes after Smoke and Ashes (the one that I read first). The book starts with Wyndham going off on his own to a Hindu ashram to get over his opium addiction. There's another plot brewing as well which I don't really understand as yet. But I'm 10% into this, if that.

What you'll love about this ashram is the decidedly non-snowflake Brother Shankar who runs the place. Another patient describes it to Wyndham:



Wow, can you imagine some libtard, weak-kneed, therapeutic-oriented modern author writing anything like that? So I can forgive a little here and there as to the shortcoming of some of the characters and plot. We'll see where this one goes.

Good point. I don't know that it rankled me at the time. What bothered me most was the telegraphing of the assassination attempt. I could see this coming from a mile away. The Dewar (I think) went all that way out to the site of the hunt only to have to quickly leave again. Red herring. But red herrings are a sign that there are fish in the sea.

I really liked that on the elephant hunt that the author deepened the character of Punit. He was an absolute James-Bondish one-dimensional "spoiled bad rich playboy" villain up to that time. I think the plot spent way too much time speculating instead of creating. Let us have that trip to the diamond minds...early and often. Let's see into this Punit. Is he as superficially rotten as he seems?

So the elephant hunt was nice in that we got behind the stereotype. But the worst point for me in the book was the truly horrid plot point when Golding wants to tell something important to Wyndham but, of course, he must wait until morning. He can't just blurt out right then and there what is on his mind.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. I almost put the book down in disgust after that. Of course, Golding never makes his meeting with Wyndham the next day. Big surprise there. Why would anyone write such cliched trash?

In fact, I don't like the character of Wyndham much at all. To some extent, that's okay. Not every central character has to be a perfect hero. And perhaps that's why Surrender-not is left unrealized and mostly undefined. Here is a guy who, by all rights, should be the star of the book. As you said, he's going to know a hell of a lot more about the country than any white guy. Yes, he'll have to kowtow to his superiors and often play the dumb Indian. But we, as a reader, would wink-wink, nudge-nudge be in on the fact that he was really a very sharp guy underneath the obsequiousness.

What I described isn't even necessarily a complex character, per se. (And we do get some of that character in the book.) But it's something. I just think it's likely that the task of getting the details right in a historical novel such as this are so onerous that characters and plot can be somewhat afterthoughts. And perhaps it's true that the talent it takes to be a good researcher isn't necessarily the talent needed to write good characters and stories.

LOL. Yes, that was 100% certain-tied.

I checked this book out yesterday night as it is the only other book in the series, which is in ebook form.  

I have reached the point at where they have discovered the body and the local Dr. has it packed in his auto to take back to his clinic for some sort of autopsy. (I suppose)

I will read along with you and may throw in my two bits every now and then. 



This is something I will try to look into. According to Theodore Dalrymple, who worked as a doctor in the British prison system, all the stuff one sees on TV about the painfulness of stopping/quitting drugs cold turkey.  I have read that cigarettes are more addicting than heroin, i.e. quitting cigarettes is more difficult than quitting heron.