King Jackal Six

Central India, 1829. On the Great Deccan Road, travellers are vanishing. Merchants, pilgrims, sepoys going home on leave, widows and small boys. They fall in with friendly strangers on the road, share their fire and their food, and are never seen again.

Mehtab Singh is nineteen, carrying six hundred rupees of his family's money south to Jubbulpore. He is one of them.

A year later his elder brother comes looking. Jaswant Singh is a veteran of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's wars, a Sikh swordsman with a sabre scar through one eyebrow and a charcoal drawing of his brother's face folded against his chest. Nobody in the bazaar will look at the drawing. Only one man will: Captain William Henry Sleeman, an East India Company magistrate whose study wall is covered in black pins, one for every traveller who set out and never arrived.

The Company's judges blame tigers and cholera. Sleeman has another word.
Thugs.

They are not a gang but a hereditary brotherhood. They walk beside their victims for a hundred miles and make them laugh. Then, at a chosen fire, somebody asks for tobacco, and a yellow silk scarf does the rest. They leave no bodies and no witnesses, and they give thanks to their goddess with a mouthful of sugar. Every time Sleeman brings one to trial, the court lets him go.

To catch them in the act, Jaswant must do the unthinkable. He must walk the road as one of them, with nothing between him and a shallow grave but the word of Feringhea, the most feared strangler in India and Sleeman's prisoner. He must sit at the killers' fire, laugh at their jokes, and take the sacred sugar from the hand of the man who led his brother to his death.

Once you eat, you are a Thug. You will never be anything else.

Drawn from the real campaign against Thuggee, King Jackal Six is a ferocious historical thriller about revenge, faith and what a man becomes to hunt monsters. It is also the story of the band of condemned felons, a widow and one grieving Sikh who became the King's Sixth.