Monday Book Review

Hello, and welcome to the Monday Book Review.

Today I’ll be reviewing The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall.

First sentence: Vish Puri, founder and managing director of Most Private Investigators Ltd., sat alone in a room in a guesthouse in Defense Colony, south Delhi, devouring a dozen green chilli pakoras from a greasy takeaway box.

What attracted me to this book was, in fact, its colorful cover design. It’s a mystery set in Delhi, starring the rather overweight but quite canny Vish Puri, private investigator of considerable repute. Written by a journalist, this book is full not only of cultural and geopolitical facts about Delhi but also of local color designed to expose some of the class inequality that Vish Puri (and, very blatantly, the author) laments.

What I liked most about this book was not, in fact, the mysteries, though they were fun and intriguing enough, but the actions that Vish Puri took to solve them. These included traveling, dressing up in disguise, bribery, deception, stake-outs, bugging people’s houses, and networking with many personal and professional connections. There was also plenty of takeaway-eating. Puri has an affinity for very spicy food and grows custom chillis on his roof.

While I enjoyed this book quite a bit, I probably won’t read its sequels, one in print and another forthcoming. I felt too much that I was the audience, a foreigner to Delhi who was supposed to be surprised and at times shocked by the city’s crime and cultural mores. It was, in short, a book with an agenda that rubbed me ever so slightly the wrong way. Class inequality, yes, I see.

I will continue my perpetual hunt for a mystery whose setting and detective play a large role in the solution of the case (as in The Case of the Missing Servant) but whose author allows the themes of the book to speak for themselves.