PHANTOM LINE
Murder in Burma draws a determined Scottish policeman into a conspiracy where love, loyalty and truth collide.
Rangoon, 1941.
A murdered accountant and a brass canteen token draw Assistant Superintendent James Cameron into a conspiracy stretching back to Jaipur. With Detective Inspector Kaung Lin beside him and war closing in, Cameron must follow a trail of hidden fuel, government secrets and murder before Burma itself collapses.
PHANTOM LINE
Cameron turned back towards the Rolls-Royce. The Phantom stood beneath the porch like some great two-tone animal, suddenly brought to rest. Its engine idled quietly. Dust coated its wings.
He opened the back door again.
The interior smelled of leather, new wool, and warm blood. An unfortunate combination. Park Ward would never approve of it.
As he reached down for the blood-soaked blanket on the floor, something metallic fell softly onto the carpet. The sound was faint, almost lost amid the activity around the hospital entrance.
Cameron frowned. He bent down and retrieved the object. A small brass token, worn smooth around the edges from long handling, no larger than a shilling, with a hole in the centre.
One side was smooth. The reverse bore the number two, and an inscription ran around the edge:
BURMAH-SHELL CANTEEN
Cameron turned it over in his fingers. A canteen token. Nothing more. The sort issued to refinery workers and depot staff instead of small change. He had seen similar tokens before on visits to workshops and factories.
Yet something about it bothered him. Jaipur lay more than a thousand miles from the oilfields of Assam and farther still from Lower Burma. Rajasthan possessed no oilfields, no refinery that could explain a Burmah-Shell canteen token. Yet someone had carried it here.
James Cameron
Assistant Superintendent, Rangoon City Police
Cameron is an engineer who never expected to become a policeman. Quietly observant, stubborn and possessed of a dry Scottish wit, he trusts evidence over assumption and has little patience for convenient answers.
Six years after an act of courage in Jaipur changed his life, Cameron finds himself investigating murder in Rangoon as war closes in on Burma.
Beneath the pith helmet and disciplined exterior is a deeply loyal man, more vulnerable than he admits, driven by one defining trait: he cannot leave an unanswered question alone. For Cameron, the rule is simple—evidence first. Always.
Chandravati Kanwar Shekhawat 'Priya'
Badaran Sa to Her Second Highness Maharani Kishore Kanwar of Jaipur
Chandravati belongs to a world James Cameron can enter but never truly inhabit. Intelligent, poised and quietly courageous, the Maharani of Jaipur’s Chief Lady-in-Waiting first enters his life beneath a veil, bleeding from a bullet meant for someone else.
Yet Chandravati is no damsel awaiting rescue. Behind the traditions and restrictions of court life is an independent, perceptive woman who understands people almost as instinctively as Cameron understands machines.
To him alone, she becomes Priya—and across six years, distance and unspoken affection, she becomes something more dangerous than a mystery: the one person capable of making James Cameron forget his precious rules.
Kaung Lin
Detective Inspector, Criminal Investigation Department, Burma Police
Inspector Kaung Lin is the kind of detective Cameron cannot easily categorise—and quickly learns not to underestimate. Immaculate, intelligent and quietly formidable, he moves through colonial Rangoon with the measured confidence of a man accustomed to being judged before he speaks.
Where Cameron pushes, Kaung Lin observes; where others see politics, he looks for evidence. Their wary professional relationship gradually becomes a partnership founded on mutual respect, dry humour and trust.
But Kaung Lin is Burmese before he is anything else, and as war approaches, duty becomes painfully complicated. Clever, restrained and strategically impertinent, he may ultimately have to choose between the police force he serves and the country he calls home.