VASEEM’S NEWSLETTER
(At the Bloody Scotland festival in September)
Hello!
If you are new to this newsletter, welcome! I send one of these out approx. 4-6 times a year and you’ll find news, short stories, giveaways, competitions, book extracts, my recommendations, articles, and more… Let’s get to it!
OUT NOV 28TH - CITY OF DESTRUCTION - the fifth Malabar House novel
I’m very excited to announce that the fifth in my Malabar House series, CITY OF DESTRUCTION, is out in hardback (and digital) format this Nov in the UK, with other countries following soon after. Here’s the cover and description:
City of Destruction
Bombay, 1951
A political rally ends in tragedy when India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, kills a lone gunman as he attempts to assassinate the divisive new defence minister, a man calling for war with India’s new post-Independence neighbours. With the Malabar House team tasked to hunt down the assassin’s co-conspirators – aided by agents from Britain’s MI6 security service – Persis is quickly relegated to the sidelines. But then she is given a second case, the burned body of an unidentified white man found on a Bombay beach. As she pursues both investigations - with and without official sanction - she soon finds herself headed to the country’s capital, New Delhi, a city where ancient and modern India openly clash. Meanwhile, Persis’s colleague, Scotland Yard criminalist, Archie Blackfinch, lies in a hospital fighting for his life, as all around him the country tears itself apart in the prelude to war…
You can read an extract at the bottom of this newsletter.
Pre-orders really help a book, so I would be immensely grateful if you ordered the book. You can order from all good bookshops including here: Waterstones or Amazon (Note: The US hardback will launch on March 4 2025, though the Kindle version will be out on Nov 28 2024. Pre-order from bookshops or here.)
99p/99c Kindle offer on MIDNIGHT AT MALABAR HOUSE - until September 30th 2024.
And if you haven’t yet dipped into the Malabar House series, you can begin with the first one, Midnight at Malabar House. In an India struggling to find its feet after Independence, India’s first female police inspector, Persis Wadia and English forensic scientist, Archie Blackfinch, hunt the murderer of a prominent British diplomat. The book won the CWA Historical Dagger, the world’s foremost prize for historical crime fiction. At the moment there is a 99p Kindle offer and a 99c offer in the US.
Winners from the last newsletter competition
In the last newsletter I asked you to tell me about your favourite James Bond, Bond film or book. I picked five winners who all received a hardback of their choice. I was glad to see a broad range of winners from both Europe and the US - a lot of people love James Bond! Here are names of the winners (reproduced with their permission) and their winning picks:
Ranee Cloud - On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
David Robinson - From Russia with Love
Vicky Wilkinson - Dr No
Fiona Baker - Goldeneye
Rachel Smith - Roger Moore
The above competition marked the announcement that in October 2025, the first book in my new series featuring Q from the James Bond franchise will be released. The book is called Quantum of Menace. I am busy writing it as we speak. Look out for a lot of publicity - and some great competitions with prizes - next year - the publishing team are very excited about this! You can find out more and get in an early pre-order here.
What have I been watching?
I love going to the cinema and watching well made TV - when I have time!..
THE RINGS OF POWER. I have been a fan of Tolkien’s universe since I read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager. I loved the films and have now had a go at the TV series. It’s a little slow burn, but engrossing. One for fantasy fans.
Free short story: ALL THAT GLITTERS
In this short story written exclusively for subscribers of this newsletter, Inspector Chopra and his sidekick, a baby elephant, must investigate the death of a gold merchant in modern Mumbai.
Read the story by clicking here.
Have you tried the Inspector Chopra books?
And if you haven’t read any of the books from the Baby Ganesh Agency series … now is a good time to start! Set in modern India, the books follow a middle-aged policeman who retires from the Mumbai police force and must solve murders. All while having to look after a baby elephant that he’s inherited… The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 40 best crime novels published between 2015-2020. You can buy from all good bookshops and from Bookstore.org, or Amazon or Amazon.com.
“Chopra, diligent, incorruptible and not entirely at ease with shiny new India, is a delight – and Ganesha the elephant, once he has cheered up a bit, proves a very useful ally indeed. Utterly charming – those in search of a gentle holiday read need look no further.” ~ The Guardian
New research
I love working at University College London’s Department of Security and Crime Science - it’s very useful as a crime writer! For those interested in science here’s some fascinating new research that caught my eye:
Making the invisible, visible
My best recent reads
I read a LOT of books, across a wide range of genres. Here’s a couple I’ve really enjoyed recently:
THE HORSE WHISPERER by Nicholas Evans
I’m thirty years late to this … but what a wonderful novel. The story of a girl and her horse who suffer a traumatic accident - and must then turn to a ‘whisperer’ a man who has the ability to heal horses. Wonderful writing and a great plot.
HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY by Bella Mackie
A razor sharp novel about a young woman bumping off members of the family who rejected her. The book sold a million copies and you can see why. One for those who enjoy wicked satire.
Leave a review… please!
Reviews are incredibly important to any book. They not only help spread the word but are used by booksellers (especially the bigger ones such as Waterstones, Barnes and Noble, Amazon) to determine their marketing efforts for a particular book. For those of you who have read one of my books, I would be very grateful if you could spend a few minutes to leave a review on Waterstones, Amazon, Goodreads, or any other forum of your choice. Thank you for your support!
warm regards from London,
Vaseem
This is a pre-publication extract from CITY OF DESTRUCTION, a novel by Vaseem Khan . Please do not forward or post in any other forum.
CITY OF DESTRUCTION
by Vaseem Khan
They found the body curled up on a cracked shelf of black rock lapped at by the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, down by the tip of the Malabar Hill peninsular.
Parking the jeep on a dirt track leading from the main road, they made their way over the rocks to the corpse. The sun floated high overhead, in a sky of electric blue. Light made an ever-shifting tracery of prisms on the water’s surface.
A crowd had gathered, though not of the human variety.
The smell of death had its own bouquet and to a certain cross section of Bombay’s population the noxious odour of a burned body was akin to the aromas emanating from the five-star kitchens of the Taj Mahal Hotel. A gang of rooting pigs had turned up, accompanied by a pack of stray dogs, a brace of langurs, a flock of gulls, ravens and crows, and a goodly contingent of Bombay’s ubiquitous rat population. They were being kept at bay by a wizened homunculus in a uniform so big it made him look like an overgrown child. Handlebar moustaches hung to his pigeon chest.
Persis watched the cut-price Zorro fence at the slavering menagerie with a bamboo lathi.
Birla exchanged words with the man and determined that he was employed as a security guard at the home of the individual who had found the body, a retired executive who lived in one of the imposing homes set well back from the rocky shore. The man had been taking his daily early morning constitutional and stumbled across the body, almost losing his breakfast in the process.
Persis focused on the corpse.
The cadaver was curled into a foetal position, burned black. A few wisps of black hair remained on the skull, but the face was burned beyond recognition. The rest of the body too had clearly been engulfed by flame.
Despite the heat, a chill ran through her.
Death had rarely rattled her. Even at the academy, she had maintained a relative indifference when confronted by cadavers in the training morgue, looking on as many of her male colleagues had turned various shades of green. Her mother’s death and Sam’s grim fatalism had infected her at an early age. Death, after all, was the ultimate democratic institution. It came for everyone, rich or poor, moral or wicked. There was little point in being frightened of it.
But anger, at the iniquitous nature of some deaths . . . Now that was permitted.
What had driven this man to his death? Was it, as Roshan Seth had supposed, a case of self-immolation? Across Bombay, many had chosen this form of protest of late, the last mode of self-expression left to the truly desperate.
Little good that it did.
In the city of dreams, the crowd that invariably gathered as yet another protestor doused himself in gasoline outside yet another government office was as likely to offer a match as it was to come to the poor fool’s rescue.
Birla cut into her thoughts. ‘The last time I smelled anything this bad, an elephant had done its business over my head.’
She decided not to ask. With Birla, a tale of woe – of which he had an inexhaustible supply – could be counted upon to take the listener down the sort of dark and winding path that usually ended in a mugging.
She saw that the sub-inspector had tied a handkerchief around his mouth, giving him the look of a particularly inept highwayman.
He was a strange man. Relegated to Malabar House because his daughter had refused the amorous attentions of a senior officer, Birla, like Persis herself, was a victim of circumstance rather than incompetence. Though he would have been the first to admit that, prior to his banishment, his career had managed to achieve as much forward momentum as a car with square wheels. Some men were born to mediocrity, some achieved it, and some had it thrust upon them. Birla was the result when all three aligned in a single individual.
Nevertheless, of all of her fellow officers at Malabar House, Birla was the one who had been most willing to offer her acceptance. The fact that he was continually braced by two no-nonsense women at home had, perhaps, made it easier for him to do so. That and the fear that his wife might give him a good talking-to were he to adopt any other attitude.
What was she doing here?
Her every cell itched to be away from this godforsaken place, back in the thick of it. She should be out pursuing the real investigation, not standing here on this lonely slab of broken rock, surrounded by wild animals, mute witnesses to another chapter in the litany of human depravity that circumscribed the city they all called home.
But Seth was right. When you pulled on the uniform, you gave the dead and the dispossessed certain rights. The right to demand justice, for one.
Whether you could deliver it or not was a different matter.
‘Why come out here to do this?’ Birla’s voice was muffled behind his makeshift facemask. ‘What would be the point? You wouldn’t catch me setting fire to myself without an audience.’
She waited while he mentally traversed the winding pathway of his own question and arrived at the logical conclusion.
‘He didn’t do this to himself, did he?’ said the sub-inspector, quietly. ‘Someone did this to him.’
She gestured at the desolate rocks. ‘You’re right in that this would be the last place in Bombay to commit such an act. And how did he get out here? There’s no vehicle on the road.’
‘Perhaps he walked? Or took a cab?’
‘In which case, we should be able to track it down. Besides, a body this badly burned needs an accelerant. A petrol can. A container. There’s nothing here.’
‘Maybe he threw it into the sea before he set himself alight?’
‘Possibly. But it doesn’t feel right. Something terrible happened here.’
Birla looked back down at the body. ‘So someone killed him. And left the body out here, thinking that perhaps the tide would sweep it out to sea.’
She nodded. Birla had always been smarter than he looked, possessed of a low cunning that occasionally allowed him to leap to the right answer.
‘Whoever did this didn’t realise that the tide rarely gets this far up the rocks.’
The sub-inspector blew out a breath of disgust, ruffling the handkerchief around his mouth. He peered darkly at the corpse as if by some supernatural effort of will he might resurrect it or, better yet, make it vanish. ‘I suppose I better find a telephone,’ he muttered. ‘Call out the meat wagon.’
A raven hopped closer. He aimed a kick at it. The bird seemed unimpressed – it was almost the same size as Birla, and looked twice as vicious.
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