The Mystery of the House of Pigeons

Three children in nineteenth-century Delhi meet a half-crazed old trinket seller who mistakes one of them for his long-dead charge, giving him a precious ring which sets off a hunt for the lost jewels of Samarkand. The children's subsequent adventures follow a frayed skein of clues into a tangle of old but still lethal animosities. The conclusion is a pell-mell chase and counter chase with an inadvertent touch of the Keystone Cops about it. This is an exciting story in which a carefully calibrated amount of cultural information and local vocabulary add to the interest without detracting from the storyline.