A young pathologist’s national service duties take him to an exotic land and plunge him into a murder investigation.

Commonwealth troops are battling Chinese communists in Malaya—part paradise, part hellhole—but disease is the real enemy for doctors and their patients. As they sit in The Dog, the local hangout for male and female officers and the local rubber plantation owners and their spouses, newly arrived pathologist Tom Howden’s gossipy friend Percy fills him in on the local scandal, much of which revolves around gorgeous Diane Robertson and her unfaithful husband, James. When someone fires on the Robertsons’ house, everyone assumes that the communists were behind the suspiciously small-scale attack. Later, when James is found shot to death in his car outside The Dog, the civilian police and the army confer and agree that they may have to look amongst their own for suspects. Inexperienced Tom’s autopsy shows that James must have been killed elsewhere. Tempers run high, and suspicions extend even to the company commander, who seems to be losing his mind.

Knight (Grounds for Appeal, 2012, etc.) has based the case on his own experiences in Malaya in the 1950s. What it lacks in mystery is more than offset by the forensic and historical details of a little-known war in a faraway world.

The unusual setting, Perak State in 1954 British Malaya, boosts this first in a new series from Knight (A Plague of Heretics and 13 other Crowner John medieval historicals). As British colonial rule wanes, a growing independence movement has resulted in an increase of terrorist acts aimed at foreigners. In addition, the desire of Malayan Chinese to have a Communist state succeed British rule has led to conflict between them and native Malays. Against this backdrop, military doctor Tom Howden, the new pathologist in the region, must solve the murder of planter James Robertson, who was gunned down in his car. The killing bears similarities to the assassination of the British high commissioner several years earlier, but given Robertson’s rocky relationship with his attractive wife, Howden suspects a personal rather than a political motive. Those for whom the exotic locale is the book’s chief appeal won’t mind the disappointing windup.