He knew from his own experience in Singapore that the further up the ladder one got, the more the job was about politics and statistics than actually… - Shamini Flint

In India, Inspector Singh, life is sometimes very cheap.

Now he was in a holding pen with various members of the Kuala Lumpur criminal fraternity and they scared him [...] They ranged from a Chinese gang member, whose dragon tattoo foraged up his arm and curled around his neck, to a large, [sic] Indian man with a jet-black moustache and pocked-marked face, brooding in a corner. The majority of his cellmates appeared from their accents to be Indonesians, part of the large contingent of illegal immigrants in Malaysia. [...] At least, he thought, the government should be proud that their efforts to integrate the various races in Malaysia into a cohesive society were bearing such fruit. It was a very multi-racial group that was penned in together.

[Inspector] Singh closed his eyes and contemplated the gloom within. Circles within circles. Would a child of one of these dead men – killed in a holy place – grow up with revenge on his mind like Tanvir Singh had done? It didn’t bear thinking about.