Abir Mukherjee’s A Necessary Evil was published in 2017 and is the sequel to his popular debut historical detective fiction novel, A Rising Man (2016). It continues the story of Captain Sam Wyndham and his partner, Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee, set in the backdrop of colonial India, a world of political intrigue, cultural tensions, and personal vendettas. The novel explores the political complexities and nuances that marked the often-tense relationships between the erstwhile Princely States of colonial India and the British Raj. In setting the novel in Sambalpore, a Princely State in the modern Indian state of Odisha, Mukherjee realistically brings out some of the political changes that took place in the colonial India of the 1920s.