DEATH IN KASHMIR

It's 1947; with India on the verge of independence the days of the Raj are numbered. Sarah Parrish, with friends ""Fudge"" and Hugo Creed, is on a skiing holiday in the Kashmir mountains that ends abruptly--when Hilda Matthews and Janet Rushton are killed in separate skiing ""accidents."" Whodunit? Well, Sarah knows that the dead women were British agents, hunted by enemy agents looking for Janet's secret cache of information. And some months later Sarah, following clues to the hiding-spot of the secret info, winds up on a Kashmir houseboat--where she keeps stumbling into dark, empty spaces, in a constant state of apprehension. Luckily, then, there's handsome, polo-playing Capt. Charles Mallory to rescue Sarah from every crisis--including the final one, when all is revealed: a complicated Communist plot behind the cryptic messages. . . and an enemy agent in hearty British disguise (as usual). Slow, long-winded going, with more of the dated romance-suspense clichÉs on display in other recently published Kaye relics--but some nice Kashmir scenery helps, along with serviceable evocations of British colonial/eccentric lifestyles. (The late Paul Scott, author of the definitive Raj Quartet, was a long-ago Kaye mentor.)