GYAN PRAKASH is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of Bonded Histories (Cambridge) and Another Reason (Princeton).

A long-lost Sexton Blake mystery, 1920s detective fiction at its best Historian Gyan Prakash of Princeton University stumbled upon part of the unpublished manuscript of Tower of Silence by Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chevalier (or Chaiwala, as he called himself) in the British Library. After scouring several Mumbai libraries, he found the missing pages. It is a thrilling tale that begins on a blistering April afternoon in Poona with the click of a camera shutter. An aerial photograph is taken from a small aircraft flying directly over the Tower of Silence. The Zorastrian community is thrown into turmoil and horrified grief at this heinous act. Beram, a suave wealthy man who drives around in a Rolls Royce but is a devout Parsi, decides to exact revenge. Thus begins a sensational cat-and-mouse game between Beram and Sexton Blake, England's most famous detective.