For the first half of this book I was irritated as heck-- it seemed as though Keating were doing a memory lane romp through all the Agatha Christie-land, with Inspector Ghote being forced to labor under every hackneyed assumption about detection to ever come out of the genre. Towards the end, however, it became a very sad book-- more about the death of empire and the passing of an age than anything else. There was something so majestic in the final moments that I was willing to forgive its other sins and excesses, grievous though they were.

Ghote is summoned from Bombay to solve a murder at the Ooty Club-- the last bastion of colonial India. He needs to determine who left a servant dead in the middle of the billiard table and what all the motives are in the little enclave out of time.