The publishers have done this book a disservice in calling it a “rip-roaring caper”. True, it has lots of fast-moving drama, but it also has a carefully researched setting in early Victorian India, where the East India Company, backed up by the British Army, controls much of the sub-continent.
There are some characters we might recognise from genre fiction – the young lieutenant, the disdainful beauty, the mysterious Indian, but they are woven into a plot which lays bare some very unattractive features of the Raj, an era which has been horribly romanticised in popular literature. At this point, an earlier respect for Indian culture is in decline and being replaced by a greedier, brutal imperialism which despises the “natives”.
William Avery is, however, an attractive character, a naive lieutenant sent out of Calcutta by the Company to find Xavier Mountstuart, India expert and novelist, who has disappeared into the depths of the jungle. In this mysterious environment grow the “strangler vines” of the title, creepers which choke the trees until killer and victim are so entangled they are indistinguishable.