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Interview with Alan McKee, author of Lucknow: Shadows Of Empire

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Lucknow Shadows of Empire is a love story and a mystery set in what was once the most beautiful and exotic city on earth, Lucknow, in northern India, a place famous for its music, art and architecture. Famed throughout Asia for its talented and carefully trained courtesans, Lucknow, city of pleasure, was the home of the fantastically wealthy Nawabs, rulers of the city. It was also the site of one of the bloodiest sieges of India’s attempt to throw off British rule.

We remember watching a documentary about that horrible incident. What is your story about?
The story focuses  on Henry Booth, whose mother was murdered during a horrific incident in Queen Victoria’s reign.  One hundred women and children were hacked to pieces with meat cleavers by a group of anti-British rebels. Henry was already in England when the ghastly event took place, even so, he has never been able to forget the horror of his mother’s death. This terrible event has formed Henry’s character. He dreams of Lucknow’s lost beauty even as he is repelled by the horrors of the fighting there.

In his last year at Oxford, Henry receives a journal that belonged to his mother during the Indian war of independence. As the reader follows the events of the past, Henry finds himself entangled in a frightening present when his rooms at college are broken into and he is attacked in public by two strangers. He is expelled, without explanation, from college for refusing to hand over his mother’s journal. Then, his foster father is killed and Henry finds himself caught up in a web of murder and theft, pitted against the terrifying Thuggee, a cult of murderers whose victims numbered in the hundreds of thousands.  Why these killers have come to England and why they are pursuing him, Henry cannot guess. Not even Sergeant Abdul, a former British agent, can guess at what is motivating the cult of murderers.

We thought you said this was also a love story?
While he reads about his mother’s past, and her affair with a man who was not his father, Henry also meets and falls in love with a
Lucknow courtesan who has come to England to avenge her own foster mother’s  killing. Henry is spellbound by the beautiful and talented young  woman. His former relationship with a childhood sweetheart is forgotten in the heat of his passion for the stunningly beautiful Umrao.

The pair try to stay alive with the cult of murderers at  their heels.
At the same time, they  must  evade the police, who believe that Henry has killed the head of his university in Oxford and his own foster father in London. Henry desperately tries to unlock the riddle of his mother’s past in order to save himself and Umrao in the present and clear his name.

What kind of readers will this book appeal to?
Anyone who has any interest in the history of India and it’s involvement with England. Anyone who likes puzzles and enjoys murder mysteries.

What kind of man is Henry?
Henry Booth is a talented musician, an outdoors man who loves rowing on the Thames. He has had a sheltered life with his English relatives and does not even realize how many British assumptions he has been led to make. It is only as the story unfolds that he realizes his misconceptions about the English and about women, including his mother.

Have you written any other books that we should read next?
Yes, I would suggest The Minotaur’s Children, set in the London of Jack the Ripper and the rampant kidnapping of young girls to the continent.

Then, try reading The Iron Beast which is set during the railway mania of the 1840s and which shows how the development of the British rail system foreshadows our own century.

All books about British history.
I am an anglophile, someone who loves technology but with both feet firmly planted in the past with a deep love of and interest in history.

Do you have a website where we can keep up with your work?
www.hudsonhousemysteries.com.

What’s next?
I’m still thinking about it.

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