The Second Inventory

Two lists of the same treasure room. One of them is lying. The typewriter remembers which.

In Varanasi, a High Court commission opens the treasure room of an old Shiva temple for the first time in fifty years. Every piece on the official 1973 list is there, all 212 of them. Then a schoolteacher hands over an envelope her father posted to himself in 1985 and never opened. Inside is a carbon copy of the same inventory. It lists 257 pieces.

Forty-five treasures are missing. Among them are a gold wish-tree with a parrot on its third branch, and a nine-strand emerald necklace that is about to be sold at a Delhi auction as a family heirloom.

Ira Sahni, the Delhi document examiner who trusts paper more than people, is asked to decide which list is true. The answer is hidden in a typewriter's crooked letters, a used ribbon in a basement nobody has cleared since the 1980s, and a goldsmith's old order book. Holi is coming. Someone steals the one machine that can prove the date. And a courteous old man with a silver-headed stick welcomes her to the city of light.

With Kabir Anand at her side, Ira follows the ink from the ghats of Varanasi to an auction house in Delhi, and back to the temple where it began. On the carbon, under a fold and a thumbprint, is a valuer's signature from 1973. She has seen that hand before. It has been writing to her.

The Second Inventory is the third book in The Watermark Files, a series of clean, fast-paced Indian conspiracy thrillers. Each book is a complete case and can be read on its own.