Books: Hypewatch

The author: Leslie Forbes, Canadian-born polymath who splices careers as a travel and food writer, radio presenter, India hand, and artist with a sideline in physics; now a feted debutante in the high-concept thriller game.

The book: Bombay Ice (Phoenix House, pounds 16.99/pounds 9.99), in which she stirs her various talents into a heavily spiced brew of murder, showbiz, squalor and science set in the mixed-up Indian metropolis "built on a shifting humus of decayed coconut palms and rotten fish manure". Scots-Indian true- crime specialist Rosalind Bengal ("Passport: British. Allegiance: unresolved") investigates the links between the serial slayings of transvestite eunuchs (hijras) and the dodgy death of a Bollywood tycoon's first wife.

The deal: Miss Smilla meets Midnight's Children? From the title onwards, through the feisty heroine to the scraps of science, there's plenty to entrap Hoeg fans. And the gaudy conventions of the Bombay novel supply lashings of local flavour. Publishers adore such taste-combinations: two trusty formulae in one. A PR blitz has tried to fix Bombay Ice as the season's top upmarket mystery, with rights already sold abroad.

The goods: Rosalind's hybrid family legacies - from an expertise in poisons to chaos theory applied to monsoon systems - come in handy as Forbes serves up platefuls of exotica filleted from Indian history, art and folklore. From the set of Hindi blockbusters to hijra bordellos and the city morgue, every louche locale prompts a torrent of "fancy-that" yarns. Around the sinister movie mogul Prosper Sharma coil motifs drawn from The Tempest, while our heroine's mixed blood focuses the theme of "empire as incest". All in all, this is a great Orientalist banquet of a book with every detail polished up to gratify foreign fantasies - a literary version of those luscious Victorian harem scenes. It's all very entertaining, but a cunning fake as well.

The verdict: As a fascinated western writer cooking up a rich Bombay imbroglio, Forbes follows hard on the heels of Clive James (The Silver Castle) and John Irving (A Son of the Circus). Irving's still the pick of the crop: he humanises all the property-box characters (transvestites, Bollywood airheads, nouveaux riches, shifty cops) in a fiendish plot of great warmth and subtlety. Forbes isn't in that league yet, but she will satisfy crime buffs who prefer long-haul romance to realism.