myBookAlert Rating (myBAR): BHOOT BHAVISH BARTAMAN. MEHOOL PAREKH. 4*: EXCELLENT.
If there’s Mata Hari of the banking and financial services world, Rupali Jadhav is she. The beautiful woman uses her sexuality to manipulate a motley crew of characters spanning banking customers and bank managers through to brokerage owners and investors and a few others in Bollywood and law enforcement in between. Eventually, her shenanigans catch up with her and she gets murdered at her house in Pune. Southern Command Army Major Bartaman Bhowmick moonlights as a private investigator and teams up with crime reporter Robin Chowdhury to help the police investigate the murder. The crime falls under the jurisdiction of Deccan Gymkhana police station headed by an incompetent Senior Police Inspector whose boss, Bartaman’s cousin, feels could use the help. This book follows a dual timeline: one, set in Pune in the present era starting from the discovery of Rupali Jadhav’s corpse lying sprawled in her bedroom and the other, set in Bombay and Pune between 1996 and just before the murder takes place in the present era. In the case of most dual-timeline books I’ve read, the flashback chapters tend to get a bit boring. This book is an exception: It’s racy all through. I finished the entire book of 317 pages in just three sittings totaling fewer than five hours, which must be an all-time speed-reading record for me. As people who follow my book reviews would have realized by now, this is one of the rare Indian author-written English novels I’ve read. The author happens to be an old friend. When a common friend referred this novel to me, I promised to read it for more than one reason. For one, murder mystery is a favorite genre and I’ve been reading books in this genre for 40 years. For another, virtually all the books I’ve read have been set outside India. Through these four decades, I’ve been craving for an India-based crime thriller. This book’s blurb promised to fulfill that craving. It covered crime and was set in India, that too Mumbai and Pune, the two Indian cities that I know best. On that count, this book delivered more than it promised: Not only does it cover many parts of the two cities I know so well but a couple of scenes in the novel, including the final one, are set in the café that’s located literally next door to my house in Kalyaninagar in Pune! All in all, this book is a good read and, considering that it’s the author’s debut novel, that’s an incredible feat. Now, for some areas of improvement: (1) The book can do with a little more characterization. In parts, it reads a bit too journalistic instead of novel-like (2) Lack of visual separation of multiple scenes in a single chapter creates abrupt change in context, which makes the book a bit jumpy in parts. Going by the other books I’ve read, the typesetting best practice for distinguishing multiple scenes in a chapter seems to be to either use double spacing between the last line of a scene and the first line of the next scene OR boldface the first letter of the next scene.
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