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Jul
Title: A Necessary Evil; Author: Abir Mukherjee; Publisher: Harvill Secker/Penguin Random House; Pages: 380; Price: Rs 599 If a crime fiction series is set in the Raj era, one installment will invariably be in a Princely state, where there is usually an uneasy pact between tradition and modernity, succession battles and other palace intrigues (especially within/from the zenana), some dodgy gold-digging foreigners, a tiger hunt -- and British India's laws don't apply. It happened to Barbara Cleverly's Joe Sandilands in the last of his India quartet of adventures ("The Palace Tiger"), and it is down the same road that Abir…