Shalimar the Clown

The place is Los Angeles 1991. Maximilian Ophuls is knifed to death on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter India slaughtered by his Kashmiri driver a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the Clown. The dead man is a World War II Resistance hero a man of formidable intellectual ability and much erotic appeal a former United States ambassador to India and subsequently America's counter-terrorism chief. The murder looks at first like a political assassination but turns out to be passionately personal. This is the story of Max his killer and his daughter - and of a fourth character the woman who links them all. The story of a deep love gone fatally wrong destroyed by a shallow affair it is an epic narrative that moves from California to France England and above all Kashmir: a ruined paradise not so much lost as smashed.