The Death of Mr. Love, a novel inspired by a true story where the victim became a villain and the killer became a hero, offers a rare and fascinating insight into the psychosexual undercurrents of Indian life.
The reverberations from the notorious Nanavati society murder in 1950s Bombay -- the fatal consequence of an affair between an Indian playboy and his married English lover -- were so great that they reached the offices of Prime Minister Nehru and changed the face of the Indian justice system irrevocably. What is not known -- has never been known -- is that a second, connected crime, so cruel that it destroyed the lives of two women, went unreported and has remained unpunished. Until now.
In present-day London the women's children unexpectedly meet forty years after their idyllic childhood in India. Driven by grief, anger, or a deeper emotion they are unwilling to confront, they return to India to uncover the mystery of the crime that caused their mothers' suffering and exact their cold revenge. But in the bazaars of today's Bombay, a city racked and burned by communal riots, their adversary still enjoys huge power, and the friends soon find themselves in real, terrifying danger.
Spanning two continents and encompassing the secrets of fifty years, The Death of Mr. Love fuses myth and murder, fact and fiction. It is a tale of stories that "begin before their beginnings, and continue beyond their ends."
