Dark Clouds Over Nuala by Harriet Steel

First Lines: New Year's Eve 1933. Western Australia. As the minutes to midnight ticked away, ever greater numbers of revellers crowded into the noisy bar.

The most prestigious entry on the 1935 racing calendar is the Empire Cup, and with the added bonus of the presence of the heir to a British earldom, everyone in the hill town of Nuala wants to go to the race course to take a look and add to the gossip mill. Others, like Inspector Shanti de Silva and his wife Jane, have been invited to dinner at the Residence to meet the heir, Ralph Wynne-Talbot and his wife Jane. The couple is stopping in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) before boarding a ship bound for England, and entertainments have been planned for them. But their hunting trip goes horribly wrong when someone dies.

Inspector de Silva is summoned to the scene, and it doesn't take him long to decide that this death is not an accident; it's murder. Now all he has to do is prove it, and that won't be easy with a rich Romanian count, the count's glamorous wife, and a mysterious British army officer (and all sorts of British government officials) to deal with.

After having read the first book in the series, Trouble in Nuala, I looked forward to reading the second entry. I was not disappointed. I enjoy the relationship between the biracial couple of de Silva and his wife Jane. They met and married later in life, and not only are they deeply in love, but de Silva also values Jane's opinions on all sorts of subjects. It doesn't hurt that Jane is an Agatha Christie fan so she can provide some help in solving her husband's mysteries.

Set in the 1930s, Steel's series shows some of the problems and culture clashes of colonial-era Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In Dark Clouds Over Nuala, these problems mainly consist of native-born de Silva circumventing the British Old Boys Network in order to solve a crime involving a prominent British family. The mystery is a convoluted one, but I recently watched an episode of Miss Marple that helped me find my way through all the clues. (No, I won't tell you the episode!)

The author does an excellent job of providing enough background in each book so readers won't feel lost if they pick up a volume in the middle. This also helps if a reader just wants to sample and not to commit to the entire series. Steel's books satisfy on several levels: characterization, mystery, and the food and culture of Sri Lanka in the 1930s. I'll be coming back for more, and-- if you sample one of Inspector de Silva's mysteries-- chances are that you will be, too.

Dark Clouds Over Nuala by Harriet Steel

ASIN: B071H6PW9M

Stane Street Press © 2017

eBook, 228 pages

Historical Mystery, #2 Inspector de Silva mystery

Rating: B+

Source: Purchased from Amazon.


 

Trouble in Nuala by Harriet Steel

First Line: Inspector Shanti de Silva exhaled a deep sigh of relief as the train left the sweltering lowlands of Colombo and commenced the long climb to Kandy.

After moving from the city of Colombo to the hill town of Nuala, Inspector Shanti de Silva and his wife Jane appreciate the slower pace of life. All that changes when a mix of a cruel and arrogant plantation owner, his lonely wife, and a crusading lawyer turns deadly. The inspector is going to need all of his experience to solve this crime.

Inspector de Silva and his English wife Jane waited until they were in their forties to marry. Yes, they'd finally met the person they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with, but they were also old enough to know their own minds and not care about any raised eyebrows. Why the raised eyebrows? Because it is 1930s colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and mixed marriages aren't quite the done thing. Shanti enjoys reading classics like Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe while Jane prefers Agatha Christie. Shanti loves the spicy foods of his native Ceylon and finds English food bland and heavy. Jane would never eat chilis for breakfast. These two main characters in Harriet Steel's Trouble in Nuala are fun to get to know-- and there's more.

This book has a marvelous sense of time and place. Readers learn about a country under British colonial rule and the problems with which it must deal. Not only that, but the descriptions of the landscape and wildlife of Ceylon are vivid and help to bring the whole book to life. Two examples:  farmers set off firecrackers to scare away wild elephants and prevent them from destroying crops, and then there are stunning scenes like "the startling lime-green splash of a paddy field where egrets stood like white question marks."

Although the killer's identity isn't all that difficult to deduce, my appetite for the other books in this series will not be denied. The only real problem I have with Trouble in Nuala is that it's too short!

Trouble in Nuala by Harriet Steel

ASIN: B01K7VSGO8

Stane Street Press © 2016

eBook, 200 pages

Historical Mystery, #1 Inspector de Silva mystery

Rating: B+

Source: Purchased from Amazon.