The Prince and the Poisoner

On 29 November 1933, Amarenda Pandey was waiting on a crowded Calcutta railway platform when he felt a sharp prick in his arm. Eight days later, he was dead and a manhunt had begun for his assassin. The details of case were so diabolical that they made headlines from London to Sydney and New York. With elements of biological warfare, illicit sex and contested wealth, the murder was reminiscent of the days of the Borgias, according to one newspaper. In The Prince and the Poisoner, Dan Morrison uncovers the gruesome tale of two warring brothers set amidst the febrile atmosphere of Jazz Age India. It is the story of a city and an empire resting blindly on the cusp of cataclysmic change, a moment when centuries-old assumptions and expressions of power are about to be forever scrambled for Indians and Englishmen alike. AUTHOR: Dan Morrison is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Guardian, BBC News and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the author of The Black Nile (Viking US, 2010), an account of his voyage from Lake Victoria to Rosetta, through Uganda, Sudan and Egypt. Having lived in India for five years, he currently splits his time between his native Brooklyn, Ireland and Chennai. 20 b/w illustrations