Abir Mukherjee's The Pinnacle is fast. The mystery is thinner.

Abir Mukherjee has left 1920s Calcutta.

The Pinnacle, published by Penguin Random House, is a contemporary thriller set in glass-and-steel Mumbai. Outlook reviewed it on 21 August. Mukherjee is the British-Indian writer of the Wyndham and Banerjee Raj-era mysteries. This book is lighter. Outlook says it runs on in-jokes and improbable escapes, not the slow deduction of the earlier series.

George Abercrombie is a washed-up Hollywood actor who now shoots whisky ads for Indian television. Outlook calls his dry cynicism a modern cousin of Sam Wyndham. He wakes with a hangover. His film-star wife, Sweety Suhota, is dead in their bed. He cannot remember the night. That is the engine.

Three viewpoints then rotate, Rashomon-style. George tries to stay ahead of the police. Amit, the Jeeves-like manservant, takes money from George's wallet and jewellery of Sweety's, and runs, with goons behind him. Gemma, Sweety's American assistant, is being blackmailed over digital evidence she holds. She is witness and target at once.

Outlook lists the usual modern-thriller kit: surveillance, social media, corporate power, geopolitical rivalry, digital files. George also needles an unnamed American President, including a comic intervention in a Hollywood murder case. The reviewer says Mukherjee writes the set-pieces with a crime novelist's clarity. The pace, the same review says, sometimes rushes past the revelations and the relationships.

The India of the book, Outlook argues, is thinner than the lived-in Calcutta of the Wyndham novels. Some contemporary Indian characters feel functional, even faintly caricatured, a problem the reviewer also flagged in The Burning Grounds. The murderer, in a small suspect pool, comes with too many clues. The last reveal does not quite hold. Energy, the review says, still carries the pages. The book is fast and playful, and light on gore.

A writer can get trapped in the period that made him. Mukherjee has chosen not to.

That choice has a cost. The Raj books had history as a second plot. Mumbai here is a stage for billionaires and phones. Outlook is right that the satire is meant to be recognised, and laughed at, in the moment. Whether that is enough depends on what you wanted from him.

I came to Mukherjee for the older books. A hangover-and-a-body opening is fine. I wanted the rooms to feel as inhabited as those Calcutta ones. The review says they do not, not fully. That is a fair complaint, and it is also the risk of leaving a city you have already mapped.

Readers who want another Wyndham will not get one here. Readers who want a Sunday thriller will. The useful test is whether Mukherjee stays in this register, or treats The Pinnacle as a holiday from 1920s Calcutta.