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Snakes Without Ladders is a crime fiction tinged with history. The story encompasses three cities on three continents – New York, London and Boma in Congo. The time span is over a hundred years. A gruesome murder of an old and loveable widow takes place in New York. What can be the motive? The police soon capture the murderer and he is now on death-row.

Orlando Chatterji, a writer and a distant relative of the widow, wants to find out the reason for this atrocious crime. He arranges an interview with the murderer, Jacques Faberge, a French citizen. Jacques asks him to meet his wife in a seedy part of London. There, Orlando receives Jacques’s great-grandmother Alice’s diary. Alice, originally Congolese, was executed in Brussels in 1910.

From her diary, Orlando learns about the gruesome torture inflicted by Karol, a Belgian colonial, on Alice and her tribe. Orlando has access to another diary – that of Sir Ian Monkston, his great-grandfather, who was a diplomat in Congo and knew Alice.

The novel is full of interesting characters, all of whom are equally ruthless. A burka-clad Muslim woman comes to Karol’s palace with Suleiman, the chef. The story unfolds in a dramatic fashion. Snakes Without Ladders is an action-packed crime thriller in which a multitude of characters play their roles ruthlessly – some of them survive, others perish.