1908. A gruesome death on board the Sky Liner RMS Macedonia exposes the clash of class, secrets and sexuality in upper class Edwardian society.
On her journey home Maliha Anderson, Anglo-Indian daughter of a Scottish engineer and a Brahmin scholar, hopes to make peace with her past, her future and what she sees in the mirror every day - until the nurse of wheelchair-bound General Makepeace-Flynn is murdered.
The General declares his innocence and Maliha is the only one to believe his story. With landfall in India only hours away Maliha must find the real murderer before the culprit can escape, even though doing so puts her own life at risk.
Not well placed as yet but has some excellent reviews (including pro website) - and the reviews weren't my relatives or friends :-)
Maliha Anderson glanced down at her watch. They were late. The RMS Macedonia was scheduled to launch at three o’clock local time, half-an-hour away, and the great Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company were strict about their schedules. She looked out at the sun-bleached streets of Khartoum, almost devoid of life in the heat of the day. Flat roofs all of a height except the domes and minarets of the mosques. To the west the sun’s light shimmered on the rippling surface of the White Nile.
She leaned forward against the polished wooden rail that curved around the stern viewing lounge of ‘B’ Deck. ‘A’ Deck above—for the truly wealthy—had a similar lounge but fewer and larger berths. Those in the cheaper second and third class berths below had no lounge at all; only the Promenade and Observation decks were available to them with no privacy to speak of.
All together they were 300 souls packed into a steel and glass container thundering through the sky at 100 miles per hour and an altitude of 3000ft courtesy of the Faraday device and the steam-driven rotors on the ends of the six stubby wings.
The Purser had given them a tour after they had lifted from London three days ago. The Macedonia was the latest passenger vessel of the P&O line, and flaunted in its newspaper advertisements as a marvel of the skies: a floating Sky Liner with its rotors to take it vertically into the clouds then swivel to drive the vessel across the firmament. It was, they said, a miracle of engineering.
Maliha sighed. Always they were “miracles of engineering”. Then she smiled. This truly was a miracle of engineering and it did indeed please her. She ran her fingers along the painted iron underside of the rail, feeling the bumps of the letters that spelt out the name of the Belfast shipbuilders: Harland and Wolfe.
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Italian
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Already translated.
Translated by Cecilia Bardini
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Ester Fernández-Vegue Medina
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