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A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta by Paul Theroux
In A Dead Hand, Jerry Delfont is a travel writer lodged in Calcutta. He's suffering from writer's block, or "dead hand," as he calls it, when he receives a letter from Merrill Unger, a wealthy and secretive woman who mentions that her son is a fan of Jerry's writing, and her son's friend is in trouble when a dead boy was found in his room. She asks Jerry to help with the situation. Once he meets Mrs. Unger, he's drawn in by her charm and tantric massages and agrees to do what he can to help her son's friend. Unsurprisingly, things are not what they seem and Jerry may be in over his head. Paul Theroux's novel has received mixed reviews with the San Francisco Chronicle saying, "Is A Dead Hand a truthful book about India? It certainly has all those 'unbearable' things that Mrs. Unger enumerates. It also has an abundance of richly drawn characters, Mrs. Unger the most enigmatic and scariest of them. Theroux has used his travel writer's eye and ear and his novelist's imagination to craft a tense, disturbing, funny and horrifying book around all of them."
