Inspector Ghote, 'one of the great creations of detective fiction' (Alexander McCall Smith), is assigned Bombay's second most important case: catching a mysterious cat burglar, who's stealing priceless jewellery from the city's richest, most influential women,in this classic mystery- with a brand-new introduction by bestselling author Vaseem Khan. All Bombay is buzzing with news of the murder of influential millionaire Anil Ajmani, who was found stabbed to death in his heavily guarded and tightly secured mansion. Every inspector in the Crime Branch hopes to be the one to nail the killer - and that includes the good-hearted Inspector Ganesh Ghote. Unfortunately for Ghote, he is assigned another, less glorious, task: that of tracking down a cat burglar, known as Yeshwant, who has been scaling apartment buildings in the dead of night to steal valuable pieces of jewellery. Aided - or perhaps hampered - by his old friend and colleague Axel Svensson, who's on a visit from Sweden, Ghote fights to uncover Yeshwant's true identity - and finds that there is more to the case than first meets the eye . . .

H. R. F. Keating, known as Harry to his family and friends, was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, in 1926. He was educated at Merchant Taylors School in London and Trinity College, Dublin, before training as a journalist. As well as publishing over sixty books in his lifetime, Keating was the crime fiction reviewer forThe Times for fifteen years and held many prestigious roles, including Chairman of the Society of Authors and President of the Detection Club. Keating's first novel about Inspector Ghote,The Perfect Murder, won the Gold Dagger of the Crime Writers Association and an Edgar Allen Poe Special Award, and was later made into a film by Merchant Ivory. He subsequently won many more awards, including the CWA's Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime literature. He lived in London with his wife, the actor Sheila Mitchell, until his death in 2011, aged eighty-four.