If the East India Company’s shadow over Avery and Blake’s hunt for Xavier Mountstuart and the way Thuggee panic masks deeper Company rot grabbed you, you’ll love how Captain Sam Wyndham lands in 1919 Calcutta and finds every clue snarled in the politics of empire. Like the way Blake peels back official lies on that brutal overland trek, Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee must read between propaganda and reality to solve a murder that the Raj would prefer explained away. It’s the same heady mix of investigation, corruption, and the uneasy ground between occupier and occupied.

You followed Avery and Blake from Calcutta to the badlands, chasing Mountstuart through rumors of Thuggee and stumbling into a Company cover-up; here, ex-officer Jim Agnihotri takes up a case after two women fall from a university clock tower in 1892 Bombay. As with the Mountstuart search, each lead deepens the mystery rather than resolves it, and the trail crosses military compounds, pressrooms, and princely courts. That same blend of danger on the road, coded letters, and revelations about who benefits from the violence drives the plot forward.

If you enjoyed watching naive William Avery harden and wise up under Jeremiah Blake’s flinty guidance—bickering, learning, and finally trusting as they close in on Mountstuart—you’ll relish Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Their initially awkward partnership blossoms into a deep, strategic camaraderie, with quarrels and reconciliations that echo Avery and Blake’s evolution on the road from cantonments to dacoit country. The tactical scrapes and moral compromises feel akin to those hard choices you saw when the truth about the Company begins to surface.

Blake’s seasoned, undercover savvy and Avery’s green but keen perspective make their hunt for Mountstuart work—Avery observes; Blake interprets. In Eco’s classic, William of Baskerville mentors the young Adso through a series of deaths in a medieval abbey. As with Blake’s cryptic lessons and sudden disappearances, William teaches Adso how to read signs, question authorities, and survive when those in power would rather bury the truth. It’s that sharp mentor–pupil rhythm you liked, pressed against a labyrinth of secrets.

If the dust-choked cantonments, caravanserais, and jungle passes of Avery and Blake’s India felt vividly real—and the opium trade’s fingerprints on Mountstuart’s disappearance chilled you—Ghosh’s novel plunges you into the plantations, rivers, and ship decks that make that economy tick. Like the march through Thuggee territory and Company cantonments, the book lingers on language, caste, soldiery, and bureaucracy, fleshing out the machinery behind the very conspiracies your duo uncovers.