GRIPPING DETECTIVE MYSTERIES IN EXOTIC LOCALES AND INTERESTING SETTINGS
Book Review: Baptism by Fire by Saumya Chaki
Detective thrillers and mysteries are liked by readers for their intense narratives, uncanny settings and the storylines delving into elaborate crime solving. The author Saumya Chaki comes up with the book “Baptism by Fire”, which details the adventures of the detective duo Samrat Sanyal and Aveek Gupta.
The book is a collection of five investigative stories. Each story has been released by the publishers on the digital platform as individual titles, keeping in mind the changing reading habits of the Next Gen readers. The enterprising new-age detective duo – Samrat Sanyal and Aveek Gupta crack some complex and nerve-wracking cases in these stories. Samrat is an ex-government sleuth turned private eye, while Aveek is a cyber-security professional turned detective.
The stories in the book are titled “Darjeeling Days, Darjeeling Nights”, “Death on the Table Mountain”, “The Hunt for the Missing Island”, “The College Street Case”, and “Outdoor in Indore”. The stories involve solving the disappearance of a labour leader in the tea gardens near Darjeeling to the mysterious death of a regular hiker in the Table Mountains of Cape Town, and searching for a mysterious island in the exotic Andaman and Nicobar, to investigating the murder of a management school student.
The settings in which this book takes its readers are interesting, from the tea gardens of Darjeeling in Bengal to the windy cliffs of Devil’s Peak on the Table Mountains in Cape Town.
The storytelling is good, and the author certainly has a knack of sustaining the reader’s interest in the enigmatic narrative, with many twists and turns, intriguing subplots, riveting themes, and the quintessential question of the whodunit. However, there are familiar clues in the narrative and the climax also fails to pack a punch in some of the stories.
The detective duo is at their best in solving the crimes in these stories, and they portray a Sherlock Holmes and John Watson-esque relationship. The character formation, apart from the detectives, is also good. The writing is masterful, with usage of adorned words and the dialogues also pack a punch.
This is a book that adroitly handles its mystery theme, and will delight detective story buffs and thriller aficionados alike. Both Samrat Sanyal and Aveek Gupta are suave, and readers would surely like to read more short stories, or even a novel, with both of them at the helm of a detective mystery and solving it with their ingenious tactics, unflinching determination and sophisticated techniques. Till then, these five short stories, which can be read in an hour, can be the companions of detective mystery lovers and of anyone interested to read Indian investigative fiction.