A pacy crime thriller set in present-day Manali, Tune for the Dead ticks all the boxes of a detective novel done right — mystery packages, a cash-strapped private detective, never-ending plot twists, and discoveries upon discoveries.
When Raina Awasthi, owner of Awasthi Tours & Travels, is found dead in his car at the bottom of a cliff on a rainy night, his daughter, Misha, enlists the help of private detective Dhruv to find out what happened. What initially looked like suicide turns out to be something more after Dhruv finds a cryptic CD with an eerie piano symphony.
As they delve deeper, Dhruv and Misha realise that Raina Awasthi was not a mere small-town businessman, and that there are powerful people who would go to extreme lengths to prevent them from finding out more.
Engagingly written, Tune for the Dead keeps you absorbed for most of its 230 pages. Crime-show scriptwriters Debashish Irengbam and Anshul Vijayvargiya’s first joint project feels like a crisp detective movie — the prose is graphic and the dialogue perky.
The action scenes — and there are plenty of those — are not those typical ones in which the superhero bashes up villains. Dhruv is clearly more brains than brawn, though there is enough brawn to work with.
Dhruv lives up to every stereotype of a detective — highly intelligent, quick on his feet, perpetually broke, drunk and shabby, and haunted by his past. We get tantalising glimpses of his jagged history, but so much has been left unpacked here that a sequel must be in the works.
For a book that starts off quite promisingly, the plot takes a fantastical turn towards the end. Too many characters and unnecessary plot twists — added more to shock the reader than to actually push forward the plot — give you a sensation of being caught in the middle of a Priyadarshan film’s climax. “I thought that happened only in movies” is a gasping pronouncement made in the middle of a car chase, and you can’t help but nod.
Overlook these minor irritations and the presence of a live, plastic-wrapped cockroach that lives in the detective’s pocket for no discernible reason, and this Dhruv mystery will have you happily dancing to its tune.
navmi.krishna@thehindu.co.in
Tune for the Dead: A Detective Dhruv Mystery; Anshul Vijayvargiya & Debashish Irengbam, HarperCollins, ₹299
