Book Review By Harsimran Kaur

Rating: 4/5

The detective tetrapod; usually a male panjandrum hooking a panattela in the mouth signalling a whiff of toxic smoke, an inflated pectoral muscle gallantly knocking off any conceivable impediment, a gun in the hand to clear the dubious air and the incubation of an ambivalent mind that fosters the inseparability of one’s susceptible instincts and distillation of what is the obvious.

 Sounds familiar! Isn’t it?

Let’s give this fetish of ours a veritable pirouette – a young married woman who carries the traditional hubris of 1920s’ and clad in the textual corrugate of a Sari that can be conspicuously manoeuvred into a swim suit styming the distinct curvature of water rotations. She feels an innocuous desire to rub-off her chin to the mathematic books hidden from the not so palatable glance of her mother-in-law. Finally, the contemporaneous desire to please her doctor husband by cooking a satisfactory meal; a perfect lemon rice recipe. In the grandiose of all these impressive alliances, Kaveri finds herself embroiled in a murder mystery that leaves her with an ineluctable indulgence to flatten the mystifying curve.

Kaveri Murthy dissuades the colloquial need to dress up as a detective, but still retains the perilous instinctiveness to separate the wheat from the chaff when a murder happens at the ‘Century Club.’, where doctors have come together for a private get-together. Already under the pervasive need to track the whereabouts of her milkman ‘Majnu’, Kaveri is flummoxed to find him with a beautiful woman at the backyard of the club and a spectacle of shadow lurking past the umbrella of trees. A scream perspires the guest to scurry ahead to be cognizance of the unexpected. The pell-mell is obvious but Kaveri does not live in denial.

She is fully corroborated by her husband ‘Dr Ramu Murthy’ and’ Mr Ismail; the Deputy Inspector investigating the case. The murder of the ‘anonymous man’ puts ‘Majnu’, his wife, ‘Muniamma’ and the mysterious woman ‘Mala’ under the heavy weight of the battle axe.

‘The Bangalore Detectives Club’ by Harini Narendrais a story of a woman, Kaveri, who believes in her inner conscious and her instinctive ability to crack open the stubborn nut. It’s the determination and a mind perched on the edge that’s helps you track the parallel lines and the end where they are bound to meet. The author has described Kaveri with the same precision and vulnerability.

Kaveri in her pursuit to save both women uses a periphrasis mind of a detective but is soft in her embarks, which makes her different from the cliché. Her interest in detective novels read through her prime of her life acts as a comrade in arms. She creates links, follows peregrinations of events and works as a planned strategist devouring the minds of each and every one present at the party. Visiting a brothel to help the mysterious woman is no longer an aberration or the scurry run to the stingy streets housing the indigent to locate the trail that would provide leads to solve the murder. Her friendship with an English woman, Daphne, turns out to be a trapped cage that she must struggle hard to open the ribs of.