Seldom does the police have the upper hand in crime fiction. Sometimes the private detective gets ahead and sometimes it is a curious kid. In Manasi Sapre’s Pune Murder Chronicles, a 42-year-old investigative reporter plays sleuth.
There’s an especially brutal murder -- a smile is etched with a pointed instrument on the victim’s face and senior inspector Davare decides to involve Chakradhar, who began his career a couple of decades ago as a crime reporter. He often seeks the journalist’s help for Chakradhar easily stumbles upon gossip and rumours that could take a case forward.
A few weeks later, as the police with Chakradhar’s team at Navjeevan, the publication he works for, are still following up on the not too promising leads, there’s a second murder. The journalist rushes back from a vacation, and it looks like there’s a serial killer on the prowl. (Spoiler alert!) While they are on the lookout for anything that could point them to the killer’s identity, little do they know that they too might be at risk of being murdered.
As Chakradhar takes the case head on, there are challenges he has to face on the professional and personal fronts. It looks like Navjeevan, running under losses, is likely to be taken over by a telecom company. Although the meetings irk him, it’s plain that his editorial freedom will suffer after the deal is clinched. He’s also intrigued to find that he’s attracted to the corporate communications head, Divya Dixit. He tries to fight it as memories of his wife Meera, who has been dead four years, wash him over with guilt. He often loses his cool, drinks and smokes more than is good for him and disappears for a few hours when fury takes hold of him.
While the victims' families keep telling him and his 23-year-old protege Mukta that the deceased were men of values, all of them have skeletons in their cupboards: all victims are men who have abused women one way or the other. If one is a wife-beater and killer, another has harassed a colleague for professional gain.
Over the initial few chapters, the reader finds out that, upright though he is, the scribe is on the police’s side. Working with them, he has learnt about the hardships of policing even as he’s aware of the rampant corruption. He’s even authored a book about it.
As for Sapre, her debut novel grips the reader and makes you want to course its 200 pages in one go.
Title: Pune Murder Chronicles
Author: Manasi Sapre
Price: Rs 299
Publisher: Rumour Books India