By Tarquin Hall
Simon & Schuster, 2009. 310 pgs. Mystery.
When Vish Puri, India's "Most Private Investigator," is hired to discover the location of the servant of a wealthy attorney, he finds he must put all his vast array of resources to the test to solve the mystery of his disappearance. The case is fraught with difficulties; will he be able to save his client from a lengthy, unpleasant prison sentence and still deal with his other cases?
What I liked most about this book was the setting: Hall does a marvelous job of bringing the reader to modern India and describing the unique conditions besetting private investigator there. The plot was fun and the characters were very endearing. The only slightly discordant note was that the author often had the characters speak English that almost seemed a caricature of non-native-English speakers on the Indian subcontinent. When they spoke Hindi, their speech has grammatically correct again. Since I haven't been to India, I'm not sure if this is how it is, but it seemed a little strange to me. Other than that, it was a fun book and I look forward to continuing the series.
JH
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