Shadow Play is the first in the series of “Kain Songket Mysteries” set in the northern state of Kelantan, Malaysia, during the 1970s. The series features an amateur female sleuth in the vein of "No.1 Ladies Detective Agency". Mak Cik Maryam, a smart and take-charge silk trader discovers a murder in her own backyard, shattering the bucolic village world she thought surrounded her, and she steps up to solve the crime.