A travel writer is drawn into a strange criminal case, and an even stranger romantic affair, in a novel that brings India &“brilliantly, blazingly to life&” (The Washington Post). When Jerry Delfont, an aimless, blocked travel writer, receives a letter from an American philanthropist, Mrs. Merrill Unger, he is intrigued. She informs him about a scandal, involving an Indian friend of her son&’s. Who is the dead boy, found on the floor of a cheap hotel room? How and why did he die? And what is Jerry to make of a patch of carpet, and a package containing a human hand? Jerry is swiftly captivated by the beautiful, mysterious Mrs. Unger—and revived by her tantric massages—but the circumstances surrounding the dead boy cause him increasingly to doubt the woman&’s motives and the exact nature of her philanthropy. Without much to go on, Jerry pursues answers from the teeming streets of Calcutta to Uttar Pradesh. It is a dark and twisted trail of obsession and need. From the author of The Great Railway Bazaar, A Dead Hand is offers &“an abundance of richly drawn characters . . . Theroux has used his travel writer&’s eye and ear and his novelist&’s imagination to craft a tense, disturbing, funny and horrifying book around all of them&” (San Francisco Chronicle). &“The real pleasure is Theroux&’s talent for rendering place and his irreverent comments on everything from the British royals to pop culture, aging, and yes, the venerable Mother Teresa.&” —Publishers Weekly