The Mango Tree

by Ram Tuli

WHAT'S GOING ON HERE? There's only one way to find Shake the Mango Tree! It’s May, 1941. Sir Lars Harding’s is now a diligent and well-respected gentleman. His factories work around-the-clock, making ordnance casings, rifle barrels, and tank turrets. He even has one that assembles radio valves. Combined with the steamship company he acquired in Footsteps in the Fog, he’s doing more than most to help England win the war. Loris, meanwhile, is idling away at Harding Hall with his wife and young daughter. Like the wrens singing outside his window in a nearby tree, Loris doesn’t know—or care—that the world had been turned upside down. Everything changes when Loris thinks Lars might have been killed in a bombing raid. He hurries back to London and finds Lars hard at work. Not only is Lars industrious-looking, he’s thin, well dressed, and his moustache and sideburns are neatly trimmed. Lars is a new man! Even the stewards and other members of the Athenæum Club treat him with dignity and respect now. Loris decides to remain in London and help Lars run his factories. As loyal readers of the earlier books will remember, heirs to Harding Hall have been dying bizarre deaths, one after another. Each heir’s death could be explained as accidental, or as karmic payback for his sins. Yet, the way each death conveniently benefits the next inheritor of Harding Hall’s immense wealth, accident seems unlikely. Certainly, no one believes that to be true. Lars is far too busy to worry about the unsolved murders for now. England is at war and he has factories to run. Then new information is learned. Harding Global Traders, a company founded by their late cousin, Hillel, is discovered to be a front for the Secret Service. Lars and Loris suspect that Hillel and Hoshaiah might have been spies, and their deaths weren’t so natural after all. Lars and Loris are soon convinced that not only were Hillel and Hoshaiah spies, but that they were somehow double-crossed by those rogues Tomson and Badminton. They can no longer concentrate on their work, knowing that Badminton and Tomson “got away with it.” Lars and Loris delve back into the family mystery. They learn right away that Hillel’s “horse-faced” wife was Tomson’s daughter. They are now certain that something far more sinister than tropical diseases ended the lives of Hillel and Hoshaiah in Egypt. Lars quickly loses interest in solving the unsolved family mysteries when he is recruited to work for the Secret Service again. He is now part of Operation Crimson Claw, a deception ploy to catch German infiltrators trying to steal a vital component that’s being made in one of his factories. “They need a fool again,” he tells Loris. Loris teams up with Fergus Kerr. Hoping to solve Hillel’s murder; however, he soon learns that all the unsolved murders are intertwined. The family mystery is far more convoluted and bizarre than he or Lars had ever imagined. In The Mango Tree, each death is examined anew. New light falls on the facts as well as the character of those involved, as if the pieces are turning in a kaleidoscope. People and events are larger, stranger, and funnier than real life, all the more with each new revelation. Conclusions that seemed certain are turned upside down. Loris is finally making progress. He discovers he had quite a knack for “this crime solving business.” Loris will soon become bored with Kerr’s tedious “branch climbing” approach and will revert to Depak Chota’s “shaking the mango tree” method. Chota’s method works better—and gives much quicker results.

354 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 2, 2018