Book: Bhendi Bazaar
Author: Vish Dhamija
Pages: 360
Read on: Kindle (via Kindle Unlimited)
Read in: 4-odd hours
Plot Summary: 1982. Three teenage girls planning a flight from the Soviet Union to the West end up being sold in Mumbai's red-light area instead. The murders start a quarter of a century later. The victims are all men. All of them tricks, waiting for trysts with high-class escorts.
DCP Rita Ferreira is quick to recognize the serial-killer strain; the media isn't far behind. The news sends shock-waves through the city. The first serial killer in living memory of Mumbai is out on the streets. As Rita grapples to establish the killer's pattern through Bhendi Bazaar, the killer gives her 24 hours to stop the next murder. Can she do that before she becomes the next victim?
Thoughts and Review: Vish Dhamija is an author whose work we stumbled upon via our Kindle Unlimited subscription. If you want to know what Kindle Unlimited is and what our thoughts on it are, please click here.
Bhendi Bazaar is a pretty taut and well-crafted serial killer thriller. It is quite pacy, the killings are sufficiently sensational, not gimmicky but have enough of a ritual to feel like this is a serial killer book. The characters are decently crafted- not brilliant and there are some very obvious 'this book is written by a man' overtures in this book- for instance, Rita has a great ass (do we need to know that for a super cop?), Rita likes drinking (she is an alcoholic but that's neither here nor there) and she likes to have no-strings sex.. all things that according to Mr. Dhamija make her super cool *insert vomit emoji*. However, in spite of all that bizarre-ness, the book is decent. The killer is fairly obvious to anyone paying attention, especially, around the 30% mark but somehow it doesn't bore you.
Rating: 2.5/5
Book: Doosra- The Other One
Author: Vish Dhamija
Pages: 360
Read on: Kindle via Kindle Unlimited
Read in: Off and on over two days
Plot Summary: Ron Jogani, a jeweller from Mumbai, is in Belgium to buy a consignment of loose diamonds worth over €10 million. Hours later he's dead in his hotel room in Brussels: murdered. The perpetrators are extremely tech-savvy and have defeated all the CCTV cameras in the hotel... but one concealed camera in the elevator has snapped one of the guys. When one of the stolen diamonds is sold in Mumbai, the Belgian Police reach out to their Indian counterparts to catch the person in the candid-shot.
The case is assigned to DCP Rita Ferreira. But when Rita and her team track down the man in the photograph provided by the Belgians, they realise there must have been some slip-up: the target does not even have a passport - he couldn't have travelled to Brussels. And then they discover that a private detective is already following their target.
Review: This book was a typical Sophomore Slump! There was no real mystery here, even though the author tries his darnest to weave a plot out of nothing. I don't know why I persevered through this book... perhaps I was in a reading slump myself and trying to finish a book instead of just putting it away?! Who knows?
Avoid it.
Rating: 1/5
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