Let me begin by writing that I stay quite near Paharganj and have walked through its lanes and by-lanes many times. The place is densely packed, is reputed to have the birth place of crime in the capital just round the corner, is full of hotels for back-packers with quite a few of them known for activities that aren’t really on the right side of the law, and is quite an amazing maze of cloistered spaces that can be a delight for both photographers as well as those who pick their pockets. It isn’t surprisingly that the author chose to begin this thriller with a foreign national getting brutally murdered in a room in a hotel here.

When a thriller begins with a murder where ‘a dead woman lay face-up on the bed, her hands at her sides’ you will, as a reader of this genre, experience goosebumps from the first line. As I turned the pages it became apparent that Vicks Menon, the benched journalist who is out to prove his credentials, isn’t there for some mundane investigation. Not unexpectedly, the novel shifts base from Delhi to Udaipur as well as Bangkok and has the wild espionage politics of the Middle East nudging it furiously. Factor in Tonya, the protagonist’s girl-friend who is also a clinical psychologist who specializes in profiling hardened criminals and you have a plot that cannot really be run-of-the-mill.

What I realized soon enough was that Murder in Paharganj by Kulpreet Yadav will have not just murders executed ruthlessly but will also hobnob with intelligence operatives, investigative intuition, and survival instincts. One does tend to turn pages faster than usual to match the pace set by the author and the palpitating heart loves the way the chase torpedoes both the journalist as well as the killer. And no, I wasn’t disappointed to find that no one was trying to find who the killer was because the book is all about how he is finally caught. We know soon enough that the killer is ‘a ruthless, well-networked male. Young, about thirty, organized and focused. Emotionless, either due to a childhood trauma or a strong belief system. If the former, the killer is very educated. If the latter, he’s a religious fanatic’. This element gives a chase a completely new dimension as there are no mists surrounding the identity of the killer. The novel moves ‘through the aroma of freshly tie-dyed clothes, fried kachoris, and cardamom tea’, tells us that for the killer the act of ‘killing was a pleasure better than sex. The idea of one human completely conquering another was exhilarating. It was a perfection that nature had created. There was nothing abnormal about killing’, and yet we are horrified to read that every time he killed, he ‘smiled wickedly. It was the smile of a killer, the smile every victim sees only seconds before his death’. This is obviously one thriller where knowing and understanding the killer leads to a better understanding of the wider horizon of issues that are playing out their part.

There is a wild intensity that pervades throughout and yet one senses fear being ‘camouflaged by over-confidence’. Unlike many other thrillers, this one doesn’t nudge a reader to get into debates and raise questions about ethics, international politics, or the right and the wrong of cross-border espionage. There aren’t complex weapon systems, the dark web, financial jugglery, or great national secrets popping up to intimidate a lover of straight-forward thrillers. The nearest Kulpreet Yadav, the author comes to writing something beyond what helps the pace accelerate is when he mentions the time another character, a police official says that ‘he saw ministers and senior bureaucrats really look busy was when they moved from one venue to another down the long corridors of the North Block. Most of them, otherwise, were as useless as tits on a bull’. By the way, this doesn’t mean that characters are running around without their own set of beliefs because we do have Jamie who begins ‘to doubt whether the biggest decision of his life – the one to serve Islam – had been the right one. He had simply become a puppet in the hands of some really nasty people’. No, I’m not going to tell you who Jamie is because I will then have to bring in Israel and the Mossad. This simply means that there is a tinge of flavor of international espionage and the novel isn’t just about one desi out-of-work journalist fighting his alcoholism and getting into the line of fire to show his editor that he has the talent that he claims he has.

Though the novel never burdens the reader with questions, I did have a few by the time I turned the final pages. I couldn’t understand why the author thought of bringing in vultures in Delhi because all one sees here are kites and eagles. I couldn’t decipher why Amar Rathore copied pictures in his pen-drive or why the security in-charge was able to literally man-handle a resort’s web portal with so much impunity or why the issue of the murder of Vick’s mother was brought up at all? I’m sure those of you will read this review and are motivated to buy this thriller, will write their opinion in the comments on my blog. I’m sure I was so fascinated with the pace that quite possibly I may have missed some details… however, these obviously did not hamper the thrill of reading this thriller.

I have loved reading the previous works published by this author and have loved the way the language or the narrative is never convoluted and hard to understand. I have appreciated the way the action in his novels goes on seamlessly without pauses and jerks. The adrenalin rush brought about when chasing a killer is what makes this novel stand out.

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Book details:

Author: Kulpreet Yadav
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Genre: Thriller
ISBN: 978-93-86826-61-9

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Murder in Paharganj by Kulpreet Yadav_Bloomsbury_Book Review

Murder in Paharganj by Kulpreet Yadav_Bloomsbury_Book Review

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Arvind Passey
09 January 2019