*** Special Feature - December 2019 ***
Is murder of human body the only kind of murder? What about murder of a dream? Or, murder of identity? This who and whydunit crime thriller explores the three questions through the unravelling of a web of lies, murder and deceit that threaten to bring crime very close home for Leena, a business journalist. The alternating first person voice of the unknown killer and third person narrative takes the story across a modern-day Bangalore and a strange discovery at an archaeological expedition with characters you would have seen around you. One of them, of course, is not who they seem to be.
Book Links:
Goodreads * Amazon
37-year-old Leena lives in one of the new, gym-club-badminton court enabled apartments in East Bangalore with her mostly absent, archaeologist husband, Mahesh, and her increasingly rebellious twelve-year-old daughter, Meera. She always found people far more puzzling than numbers. Their actions rarely added up.
Her best memory of her childhood remained the dusty train journeys from Kolkata to the sleepy town of Burdwan where her grandfather, a criminal lawyer, would let her spend hours exploring his library that housed books on crime and books on humour, stacked, back to back across all the rooms and even in the courtyard. He taught her to be curious and to keep digging, beyond the obvious. Reading his articles, later, she learnt about murders, and about murderers. But the ones he had found really hard to defend, were the ones, he called frauds. Leena went through phases of wanting to be a librarian, and a detective.
Now, at 37, she has the charmed life; a job, a kid, marriage, friends, a house. But her job refuses to give her any sense of meaning. Her daughter is increasingly becoming a stranger with hugs forbidden and closed doors, an open invitation for minimal conversations. Her husband seems to have withdrawn into an ancient cave of silence, of their own digging. And her friend, Abhimanyu, seems to be living the Mahabharata metaphor of his own name, trapped, without an exit plan.
At least the house is in order; hardly needing her failed experiments with cooking and her lazy attempts at cleaning. Cooking is taken care of quite satisfactorily by her scowling, entrepreneurial cook, Hiren. And her inept experimentation with Kannada ensures that she can only communicate in sign language when anyone tries to spread the morning apartment gossip dose.
“Your problem is that you rebel too much, Ms. Eternal-Idealist.” Mahesh used to laugh at her in the days when they still had deep conversations over dark chocolate. And her daughter had put it even more clearly – “Chill mom, imperfection is in!”
Leena changed jobs endlessly, in search of something she couldn’t define, even to herself. Each job made her less sure of what she was digging for. Humour used to be her tool to hide her true feelings and to make light of what she deemed as her failures as she kept jumping dreams.
Her itchy feet have now lured her to another new job, this time, as a business journalist. Maybe she would be saved from being a cynic yet. But of late, she is finding herself questioning the stories she is writing. And the mask of humour is fading. She feels that she is becoming what her grandfather always hated – a fraud. She wonders how far she is willing to go, to bring meaning back to her own life.
Giveaway:
You could win a copy of A Marketplace for Murder.
There was a novel in verse that I read, named identical. I never guessed the ending on that one and when the plot twist came, I was so shocked.
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