Ganja Coast

Tough to put down, this engrossing follow-up to Season of the Monsoon (1993), brings back half-Indian, half-English George Sansi, newly retired from the Bombay police. Sansi is tapped by his former boss, Narendra Jamal, for some undercover sleuthing around the city of Goa, where plans for a free port have shifted greed and crime into high gear. Jamal hopes to bring down a corrupt, high-ranking minister through his links to the dealings of Prem Gupta, who manages the minister's illegal business (and Goa's government). Using a vacation with Annie Ginnaro, his California-born lover who writes for the Times of India, as a cover, Sansi soon finds that one of Jamal's contacts has fled town and that the other, a former police pathologist disturbed by the suspicious death of a nine-year-old American girl, is afraid to help. ``There is no law here,'' he warns. While Sansi stakes out Gupta, Ginnaro makes friends among the area's transplanted American hippies, who are now in the way of Goa's development. Sansi's blue eyes are more distinctive than his personality and Ginnaro is often more irritating than spirited, but Mann sketches the character of ``the most corrupt society on earth'' with enthusiasm and detail, delivering his imaginative, unpredictable tale with nearly irresistible style. (Feb.)