Ganja Coast

This is a better book than Mann's first Sansi mystery ("Season of the Monsoon"), and I loved that book as well. As soon as you open the book and start reading it, you feel as though you are actually in India - Mann's descriptive powers, both of people and places, are that good. And, as with "Season", the violence is mostly implied, and yet you cringe at it just the same (it's implied except for the scenes with the swami and the cobra, and I REALLY cringed at that). My only complaint with the book was with the character of Annie Ginnaro. Because a major part of the book deals with expatriated American hippies, her role is a necessary one, but somehow, she still seems out of place to me. A lot of Mann's story seems stilted when Annie is involved. But I'm still anxiously awaiting the third Sansi mystery, which is currently available in hardcover

By the time you careen through the plot of the Ganja Coast, you'll know more than you may want to know about the corruption of Indian politics, the bribe-ability of the police, the plenitude of available drugs, and the cheap price of human life. Paul Mann's Ganja Coast features George Sansi, an Anglo-Indian lawyer/police inspector who tries to defeat the efforts of the Minister for Economic Development, Rajiv Banerjee, to gain so much financial power that he can blackmail members of the cabinet into appointing him to greater political power. Sansi "vacations" in Goa with his American newspaper reporter girlfriend, Annie Ginnaro, whose observations provide Sansi with an opportunity to explain political machinations indirectly to an audience of readers unfamiliar with Indian politics. Members of the cabinet, with Banerjee's help, are buying up large tracts of land along the Goa coast prior to its being named a free port and developed into a major tourist destination. The coast is presently inhabited primarily by ex-patriate former hippies heavily into the drug scene, which is controlled by Rajiv Banerjee. As the political and drug worlds collide with substantial loss of life, Sansi the investigator illustrates what is good about India and its people