Arkenshaw Annals: And Shame the Devil (1967) and Serpent's Tooth (1971), by Sara Woods

first American editionreprinted by DellOne thing I enjoy about Sara Woods is how she varied her London settings with more than occasional jaunts to Yorkshire, taking her brilliant barrister-sleuth Antony Maitland up north to her own native ground, where she was born in 1916 and grew up into adulthood in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1967 in the detective novel And Shame the Devil, she introduced to her loyal readers the city of Arkenshaw, "one of the smoke-grimed industrial cities of the West Riding." Here she takes on what was then, and is again now, a very topical issue: immigration from Asia to the United Kingdom. In the 1960s, after the partition of India in 1947, Pakistani immigration to the UK increased hugely, as demand for labor in Britain rose. In just the five years between 1961 and 1966, the British Pakistani population nearly quintupled, up to around 120,000. By no means all of the native British population was pleased with this, despite the fact that Pakistanis provided vital…