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Reviews for Six Suspects

 

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The Times review

by Marcel Berlins

July 27, 2008

 

I do not normally recommend crime novels longer than 500 pages [Editorial Note: the published version is a mere 472 pages!]. They rarely repay that amount of attention. I’m making an exception with Vikas Swarup’s ‘Six Suspects’: it’s unusual, witty, quirky, cleverly plotted, intelligent, and along the way it’s an informative satire on Indian politics and values.

 

It begins and ends with the shooting of a rich, spoilt playboy, ‘Vicky’ Rai, at his own lavish party, held to celebrate his wrongful acquittal on a murder charge - engineered by his corrupt father, the Home Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Everyone at the party was searched, but only six were found to have guns, a disparate bunch with wildly different possible motives - personal, political, and plain dotty.

 

The final few chapters provide an array of solutions. In between, Swarup relates the often comic, intertwining stories of the six, leading up the fatal evening. Too long, yes, but ‘Six Suspects’ is a rollicking good read.

 

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 Books of the Times

 

Here’s a Clue: Mr. Kumar, With a Gun, in India

 

By JANET MASLIN

Published: June 24, 2009

 

“Q&A,” the novel that became the basis for the smash-hit film “Slumdog Millionaire,” used questions from a television quiz show to prompt flashbacks about its main character’s life story. Here’s a question for its author, Vikas Swarup: Can a novel be any more high-concept than that?

 

Yes it can. Mr. Swarup’s second novel, “Six Suspects,” is a Bollywood version of the board game Clue with a strain of screwball comedy thrown in. Its stock characters are easily identified: the Bureaucrat, the Actress, the Tribal, the Thief, the Politician and the American. Each attended the party at which a man named Vicky Rai, a playboy film producer, was murdered. Each has a gun and a motive. And although the story’s geographical span is even bigger than India, the whole thing feels handily confined to the kind of isolated, air-tight setting that Agatha Christie’s readers love.

Thanks to such a schematic setup “Six Suspects” is gleeful, sneaky fun. But it’s also a much more freewheeling book than the format implies. Mr. Swarup, an Indian diplomat, brings a worldly range of attributes to his potentially simple story. And he winds up delivering a rambling critique of Indian culture, taking shots at everything from racism to reality TV. Yet Mr. Swarup’s style stays light and playful, preferring to err on the side of broad high jinks rather than high seriousness. A fizzy romp seems to be the main thing he has in mind.

 

Oddly enough, that ambition turns this formulaic-sounding book into a refreshing oddity. It bears no resemblance to any of the cookie-cutter genre books of this season. Its idiosyncrasy becomes apparent with the first of the six suspects, the Bureaucrat: Mohan Kumar, who was a man of power and influence until he hit forced retirement at 60. Thus adrift, he lets himself be coaxed to a séance at which the spirit of Gandhi is scheduled to appear. “I see dead people,” someone at the séance says with a snicker.

 

Mohan has no belief in the claptrap of séances. And as a hard-drinking, meat-eating adulterer, he hasn’t much use for Gandhi anyhow. But a funny thing happens at the gathering: Mohan has the strange sensation that a foreign object is sliding down his throat. Soon afterward he develops a split personality. He insists that he is a holy man half the time. But he can forget all about this posturing and resume his old vices as if nothing had happened.

 

“Six Suspects” is zany enough to get Mohan jailed and give him a cellmate who utters nothing but the titles of novels. For instance: “What are you in jail for?” “Atonement.” “And what do you think will be your punishment?” “One hundred years of solitude.” “Who is your best friend here?” “The boy in the striped pajamas.” Laugh or groan at this, either way it gets your attention.

 

So do Mr. Swarup’s plot machinations about Shabnam Saxena, a smoldering Bollywood star who somehow takes her marching orders from Nietzsche (and at one point grills another character about his familiarity with the writing of Bernard Malamud). Shabnam worries so much about her image and reputation that she really ought to anticipate how much trouble the story has thrown her way, once there turns out to be an innocent country girl who looks enough like Shabnam to be her double.

 

Meanwhile, on a plane from the United States, an idiot named Larry Page is headed from Texas to India with plans to make Shabnam his bride. Somebody duped him into falling in love with her picture and mistaking her for a mail-order bride.

 

Larry, of course, has his own capacity for creating mix-ups, since he shares his name with one of the two Google founders and strikes ruthless terrorists as a good target for kidnapping. Mr. Swarup generally treats his characters warmly, but this American is made a boorish lout. The book says that Larry might look like Michael J. Fox, but only if he lost a lot of weight.

 

“Six Suspects” also condescends to the character it calls the Tribal, a black, five-foot-tall Onge tribesman who is treated like a slave when he is brought from his native island to mainland India. Yet this character, whose name is Eketi, still becomes Mr. Swarup’s most lovable creation. While the others have their venal motives, Eketi has a kind heart, but he is beautiful to only the blind woman who falls in love with him. The odd-couple romances that bloom in these pages help tie together what are essentially six novellas. And they lead to the fateful night that culminates in Vicky Rai’s murder.

 

Eventually Mr. Swarup will provide the necessary denouement to his whodunit. And that denouement may be even more mysterious than it had to be. But the real fun here is in watching the separate story lines develop and in watching Mr. Swarup weave commentary into even his book’s looniest moments. When Shabnam makes a film in Australia and watches blond female dancers trying to perfect their Bollywood choreography, she wonders if she isn’t watching some kind of colonialism in reverse. When a rich girl falls in love with a poor boy, in a plot twist straight out of Indian romance movies, that boy responds with a figurative wink. “I don’t know whether to thank God or Bollywood for this remarkable turnaround,” he says.

 

“Six Suspects” aspires to broadly entertaining pratfalls, and it is endlessly eager to please. Not even the corrupt politician who figures in the plot (and whose wheeling and dealing are conveyed by transcripts of his outrageous phone calls) is terribly complicated, although Mr. Swarup can use the simplest characters to create frissons of mystery. The politician is Vicky Rai’s father, and he has grown increasingly impatient with his son’s arrogance.

 

“You must be familiar with the concept of sacrifice,” he tells his chief henchman. “Have you heard of Abraham?” That makes him one more murder suspect in this book’s expertly delirious scheme.

 

Find the review at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/books/25maslin.html

 

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Outlook India Review

Books \ Reviews

Magazine | Jul 21, 2008

 

Who Killed Vicky Rai?

The story is definitely Jessica Lall. But the shooter acquitted, it takes a life all its own, via six narratives.

Kalpish Ratna

 

If rani pink is the new black, Six Suspects is crime noir. Trashy, louche, streetsmart and suave, it is as Delhi as it comes. The carpet may be Bukhara but this one is about the sweepings beneath, and not merely the whiff in the lungful of Clive Christian # 1 you just inhaled. This book is, to quote one of its characters, "about as subtle as a horse turd in the cream pitcher.”

 

Which is exactly why it works. Anger electrifies it, making the flat, unimaginative prose an asset, not a liability.

 

Swarup reins back humour, hyperbole, insult, and relies instead on that most Indian of weapons—shrewdness. He reads his characters as a chess player reads an adversary and this makes him an excellent ventriloquist; all six suspects have believable voices.

 

This is a morality play; its strength, the suspects’ narratives. Swarup gets into his characters’ skin fast. That’s no mean skill.

 

Difficile est saturam non scribere—it’s hard not to write a satire—Juvenal’s prefatory sentence justifies Six Suspects, a roman a clef based on the murder of model and socialite Jessica Lall. The facts are common knowledge.

 

The murderer’s acquittal sets off paroxysms of ire among the capital’s Beautiful People and a retrial resulted in conviction.

 

What if there had been no public backlash? This premise starts the book. "Not all deaths are equal. There’s a caste system even in murder. The stabbing of an impoverished rickshaw-puller is no more than a statistic, buried in the inside pages of the newspaper. But the murder of a celebrity instantly becomes prime time news." The novel follows real events up to the shooter’s acquittal. From then on, Swarup invents a series of events leading to the murder of Vicky Rai, the man who murdered model Ruby Gill.

 

Vicky Rai is shot at the party celebrating his acquittal. There are six suspects. Shabnam Saxena, Bollywood enchantress, described as the ultimate wet dream. Munna Mobile, the cellular thief from Mehrauli. Eketi, the Andaman islander on a mission to recover the stolen sacred rock, the ingetayi of his tribe. Home minister Jagannath Rai, who has all of Uttar Pradesh trapped in his corrupt coils. Larry Page, the forklift operator from Waco, Texas, in search of his mail-order bride. And Mohan Kumar, retired bureaucrat, periodically possessed by the spirit of Gandhi.

 

There are no surprises. Everything abides with the script and the characters are stereotypes that never rise above the moment. Vicky richly deserved to be murdered and the six lives we’re led through explain the justice of his killing.

 

This is a morality play. Its strength lies in the narratives of the suspects. Swarup gets into the skin of his characters quickly and without fuss. With the first few sentences of each narrative, the reader experiences the character. That’s no mean skill in a novelist. He can also zoom into the core emotion with an intelligence that has nothing at all to do with analysis. Munna, helpless and terrified, watching his beloved adopted sister Champi struggling with her rapist, goes through the gamut of terror, sorrow, denial, uncertainty before he gets resolve enough to lash out—and the writer’s not ashamed of Munna’s ambivalence.

 

The travails of Larry Page are picaresque enough to stand alone. The slow, kind American, his development arrested somewhere between deprived childhood and grudging puberty, discovers his mail-order bride Sapna Singh is a swindle as soon as he lands in Delhi—she’s really Shabnam Saxena the actress. No matter. Mr Gupta of Shylock Detective Agency will track her down. Meanwhile, Larry must wait at a cruddy hotel in Paharganj. "In just three days, Delhi had broken my heart, blown my mind and blasted my intestines." Page’s adventures are yet to begin. Swarup is deft in limning Larry’s education from credulity through forbearance to energetic seize-the-day opportunism.

 

Equally canny is the pathos of Eketi who plays out Larry Page’s story in reverse.Eketi narrowly misses being killed in a bomb blast at Magh Mela. "Allahabad Railway Station bore no sign of the carnage happening in another part of town. Trains came and went. Passengers embarked and disembarked. Porters hustled and bustled. It was business as usual." Banal? Yes, but it captures Eketi’s desolation.

 

I worry that this novel will be read as a thriller. It is a grim carousel of games sacred and profane, a neat leela that capsules our times.

 

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Book Page Review


Mystery & Suspense
Review Date: July 2009

Crime and punishment in India

Review by Tasha Alexander

 

Vikas Swarup’s Six Suspects is not an ordinary murder mystery. Vicky Rai is as awful a reprobate as an author could create—“the poster boy for sleaze in this country.” Insider trading, defrauding investors, bribery and tax evasion are just the beginning. He lacks any remorse for having run down six people while drunkenly driving the swanky BMW his father gave him for a birthday present. As a follow-up, he kills two bucks on a wildlife sanctuary. Finally, in a crowded bar, he shoots a beautiful bartender named Ruby Gill point-blank in the face, angry that she wouldn’t serve him another drink after closing time.

 

If there’s anything Vicky excels at, it’s escaping punishment. After a five-year trial, he’s found not guilty of this grotesque crime. But while celebrating his acquittal at a blowout bash, he is shot to death. The police seal the scene and search all the guests, identifying six suspects, each of whom is carrying a different gun.

 

And it’s here that Swarup’s story takes off. Not only does he reject the standard structure for a crime novel, there is also no traditional detective or brave hero to be found. Rather than planting clues and flashing red herrings, he tells the tale of each of the suspects—a career bureaucrat suffering from split personality disorder (half the time he believes he’s Mahatma Gandhi), a scary-naïve American tourist who’s come to India thinking he’s getting a mail-order bride, a cell phone thief, a tribesman from the Andaman Islands, a sexy Bollywood actress, and Vicky’s own father. 

 

Swarup has taken an ambitious step with this book, and it’s a fascinating and complex read, as well as a journey through diverse views of modern India. Rich with culture, this novel should not be left out of any holidaymaker’s suitcase. 

 

Tasha Alexander is the author of And Only to Deceive. Her latest novel, Tears of Pearl, will be published in September.

 

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Shots: The Crime & Thriller Ezine

July 2008

Review by Ayo Onatade

 

Ayo Onatade is an avid reader of crime and mystery fiction. She has been writing reviews, interviews and articles on the subject for the last 12 years; with an eclectic taste from historical to hardboiled, short stories and noir films

 

This is the second novel to be written by Indian diplomat, Vikas Swarup and is based on true life events.  It is a multi layered story about crime and corruption in modern day India. Swarup’s first novel, Slumdog Millionaire has been nominated for 10 Oscars and 12 BAFTAS, and has already won 4 Golden Globes.

 

Vivek (better known as Vicky) Raj the well known playboy son of the Indian Cabinet Minister- the Home Minister of Uttar Pradesh murders a young waitress Ruby Gill at a fashionable restaurant in New Delhi. The reason? Because she refuses to serve him a drink. At his trial he is acquitted and he decides to throw a party at his farmhouse. However he gets his comeuppance when he is murdered at the party. When the police search all the guests six of them are found to be carrying guns. Who are these six guests? As the reader plays detective we follow Arun Advani India's best known investigative journalist as he tries to get to the bottom of the murder. The six potential suspects are a crooked official, an American tourist, a stone-age tribesman, a sexy Bollywood actress, a young mobile thief and an ambitious politician.

Each suspect has three chapters each under the headings Suspects, Motives and lastly, Evidence where everything is revealed. Each of the suspects has a reason to kill Raj! But which one actually did the deed?

This is a very interesting and well- written story. With sharply drawn characters and strong plotting with a sense of place that makes you feel as if you are walking along the streets of India. Six Suspects is in fact very reminiscent of Dorothy L Sayers’s Five Red Herrings. The way in which the story is told is very ingenious and it is interesting to go along for the ride as the culprit is slowly but surely revealed. It is also an perceptive look at the heart and spirit of contemporary India. The author's finely conventional and fearless plotting will no doubt please those readers who enjoy classic mystery novels. Don't expect gory and blood in Six Suspects because there is none. What you do have is an inventive whodunnit that is certainly worth more than a second look.

 

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E-zine reviews

 

Six Suspects - A Review

By Nalini Priyadarshni

 

If your first novel is turned into a movie which takes the world by storm and ends up with 8 Oscars in its booty, coming up with another can be quite intimidating. But luckily by the time Slumdog Millionaire, based on Vikas Swarup's first novel, Q& A sent the whole world in frenzy with the stupendous success, his second novel had already hit the bookstores. The only thing he now has to deal with is the sky rocketing expectations of the readers.

 

By the time one reaches at the bottom of the first page of his second novel, Six Suspects, one knows that Vikas Swarup does not need to lose his sleep worrying about the reaction of the readers. This novel is entirely different from his earlier work in its premise. It's the story of six individuals coming from diverse back grounds who are present at a party where a murder takes place. Out of hundreds of people present there, they become the suspects as each one of them is in possession of a gun. They all have a perfectly plausible reason to murder Vicky Rai, a play boy who was hosting the party to celebrate his acquittal from a murder case that had caught fancy of the whole nation.

 

Out of these six suspects, a retired bureaucrat named Mohan Kumar is grappling with possession by a spirit which takes over his body at the most unexpected times while the second suspect is a celluloid goddess, Shabnam Saxena whose stardom has become her nemesis. Larry Page, an American who had flown to India to marry his internet girlfriend becomes the third suspect while the fourth suspect is none other than Vicky's father, Home Minister of Uttar Pradash, Jagannath whose political career comes under doldrums thanks to Vicky's brazen misdemeanors.

 

Munna Mobile is the next suspect who is a petty thief but is propelled into the world of rich and mighty after an inadvertent encounter with pretty lass in a discotheque, following an unexpected windfall. Last suspect is a tribal Eketi Onge belonging to a dying tribe overwhelmed by the intrusion of the so called civilized Indians responsible for their welfare. He leaves the shores of Andamans to bring back the sacred stone stolen from the tribe by a welfare officer and though initially fascinated by the glitter of modernism; he soon gets disillusioned and wants to return home.

 

Many readers and critics have compared this novel to Agatha Christie's works which could be due to the eye for the detail that Vikas Swarup has. But this comparison is a gross injustice to the novel as it's not just a whodunit, but a multifaceted, richly textured tale of India as seen through the eyes of assorted characters. This book has a far wider canvass than was ever attempted by Agatha Christie.

 

The book is a pure entertainer and even the most mundane and sorrowful moments in the lives of the characters have been enliven by the interesting observation and witty comments made by them. The first person narrative has its added advantage as the style of narrative is as varied as the characters themselves. Larry Page's narrative generously sprinkled with the typical American slangs is a huge contrast to the telephonic conversations of Jagannath that are used to take the narrative forward. But the real fun is in watching the development of different story lines and then their mergence into one great dénouement.

 

Another factor that not only adds to the virtuosity of the narrative but also makes it sound hauntingly familiar to an average Indian is the inclusion of epoch making events of post modern Indian history in the narrative. Whether it is Union Carbide tragedy or Jessica Lal murder case or Sanjeev Nanda BMW hit and run case, they all are camouflaged and added to the plot and contribute towards making the narrative multi layered, and rich.

 

Six Suspects is a heady mixture of comedy, pathos, tragedy, humor rolled into a classic whodunit. It's impossible to put this book down once you start reading this riveting page turner that provides first hand insight into contemporary India.

 

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Library Journal Reviews

 

Michele Leber

July 15, 2009

 

In this neatly constructed mystery, Indian author Swarup (whose 2005 novel, Q&A , was made into the film Slumdog Millionaire ) provides a vivid portrait of his country and its culture. The premise is simple: after 32-year-old industrialist Vivek "Vicky" Rai ("the poster boy for sleaze") is acquitted of a much-witnessed murder, he's shot and killed at a party. The six suspects are the partygoers found to be armed: a retired bureaucrat who's sporadically possessed by Mahatma Gandhi, a famous Bollywood actress, an Onge native sent to retrieve a sacred relic, a poor cell-phone thief, a Texan seeking his mail-order bride, and Vicky's own power-hungry politician father. Background pieces about each suspect paint a picture of flagrant corruption, murder, and betrayal, as well as compassion and love, as the suspects' lives occasionally intersect. Revelations in the closing pages incite the population to call for much-needed reforms. Still, as the truth is revealed in layers, like the peeling of an onion, it's also clear that plus ça change....

 

VERDICT: Enriched by the sights and smells of contemporary India, this mystery shows Swarup to be a skillful prose stylist and deft handler of plot, who's likely to win more readers.

 

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Romantic Times Book Reviews

 

Six Suspects - (* * * * 1/2)

 

The author of Slumdog Millionairehas another blockbuster of a story that begins with a murder, then delves into the lives and motives of the six suspects. The reader becomes intimately involved with each suspect while being treated to an eye-opening account of life in India.

 

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Booklist

 

Starred review

 

Charming, atmospheric, and driven equally by character and plot, Six Suspects is bound to be popular with traditional mystery fans and readers of international crime fiction, as well as the legion of Slumdog devotees. Highly recommended.

 

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Winnipeg Free Press

 

Six Suspects

Reviewed by Dave Williamson

June 21, 2009

 

INDIA'S Vikas Swarup hit the jackpot with his first novel Q&A, which became the Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire.

 

He now delivers an action-packed and often hilarious followup that exposes corruption in high places.

 

In the opening pages, Swarup divulges that a young industry mogul named Vicky Rai has been murdered.

 

The deed was done at a large party hosted by Vicky himself to celebrate his being cleared of killing a female bartender named Ruby Gill.

 

The police have identified six suspects. Swarup devotes the next 400 pages to the individual stories of how each of the six became implicated. What pulls the reader through the novel is wondering how such a  disparate group could have ended up at Vicky's place  and why they wanted to kill him.

 

Part of the fun lies in Swarup's using a different narrative style for each story. Also, Vicky is such a nasty fellow, just about anybody wouldn't mind seeing him dead.

 

The six suspects are:

 

-          Mohan Kumar, former chief secretary of the state of Uttar Pradesh; through a scary incident, he develops Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and from time to time takes on the soul of some other person, often Mahatma Gandhi.

 

-          Munna Mobile, a lower-class young man who has a knack for stealing cellphones out of cars; one such theft leads him to a briefcase full of money. He falls in love with a mysterious young woman who turns out to be Vicky's sister Ritu.

 

-          Shabnam Saxena, one of India's best-known movie actresses. Beautiful, eloquent, and adept at keeping Vicky Rai at bay, she falls victim to a double-cross.

Her story is told through her personal diary.

 

-          Larry Page, a naive Texan who's often mistaken for the head of Google; he goes to India expecting to marry a young woman he's been corresponding with. Larry tells his own story in a kind of Texas twang ("[The roads] were so bad, even buzzards couldn't fly over them, and so crooked you could see your own  tail light").

 

-          Eketi Onge, a rather primitive young man sent to India by an island tribe anxious to recover a sacred stone that had been stolen from his people. He falls for

Munna's blind sister.

 

-          Jagganath Rai, politician -- home minister of Uttar Pradesh -- and Vicky's father; his story is told entirely through telephone conversations.

 

It would've been helpful if the book included maps and a glossary. The latter is needed to explain some of the Hindi terms, especially those used for clothing.

 

But the novel is mostly hair-raising fun. For literature lovers there's even a character who speaks in nothing but book titles.

 

There are some crazy coincidences, some zany twists, as well as an investigative journalist's columns and, as the novel rushes to its surprise conclusion, some TV news reports.

 

Put Six Suspects on your list of compulsory beach reading.

 

 

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg novelist.

 

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Blog: Half Deserted Streets

Book Review by Lauren

 

After reading and loving Swarup's first novel Q&A (also known as Slumdog Millionaire), I was incredibly excited to check out his second tale, also set in India. The book, which does not come out in the states until October, takes us through the streets of India yet again, in an amazing, yet harrowing tale of death and, maybe, redemption.

 

Vicky Rai, the son of a high-profile Minister, was found shot dead in his farmhouse on March 23 during a very glamourous party. Although seemingly a sad event, the party was to celebrate Rai's aquittal from a murder he committed. This was the 3rd time he got away with murder. Apparently, someone didn't like that.

 

At the party, six suspects were found with guns. The six people included Mohan Kumar, a crooked businessman who might have been possessed by noneother than Ghandi; Larry Page, a Texan tricked into going to India to marry a mail order bride; Shabnam Saxena, a very famous Bollywood actress who tries to prove that she's more than a pretty face; Eketi, a tribal trying to find his village's sacred relic; Munna, an unemployed cell phone theif ; and Jagannath Rai, the Home Minister of Uttar Pradesh and, of all things, Vicky Rai's father.

 

The lives of the six suspects are told in rotation throughout the novel, leading up to the murder. Each character has their own voice; where one character's story is told through diary entries, another's is told through phone calls. Swarup is amazing at building excitement and intrigue as each character's tale unfolds. As you read each character's story, you start questioning everything. "Could they be responsible for it?" "Is it worth it?" "Can we forgive them?"

 

Much like Q&A, everything comes together in the end, revealing that in one way or another, each life is wound together like a tapestry. And then end is definitely worth it. As each character's story wraps up, you see in a very satsifying manner who did it, why, and how. Much like the game of Clue, the book keeps you guessing.

 

Swarup has an amazing talent when it comes to describing elements. He gives an accurate, if not terrifying at times, look at India - from the swanky houses in Delhi to the slums down the road. For those who've read Q&A, there are some quick comments mentioning the characters, which made me cheer. I love when authors do that. (If you've only seen the film, you won't get the references, sadly).

 

I really enjoyed Six Suspects and am excited to see what Swarup brings us next. Once the book comes to America, I suggest checking it out if you're interested in crime dramas, life in India, or just really intense books that keep you up wondering what might happen next.

 

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Financial Times

 

Six Suspects

Review by James Urquhart

 

Published: March 2 2009

 

This is the second novel from the author of Q&A, made into the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. Gangster and playboy Vivek Rai is shot at a party that he threw after being acquitted of murder. His father, the thoroughly nasty home minister of Uttar Pradesh, is one of six suspects arrested for his killing, along with a Bollywood actress, a tribal Andaman islander and a mobile phone thief.

 

Retired bureaucrat Mohan Kumar and a “dim-witted” American visiting India in search of his fictitious pen-pal fiancé complete the cast.

 

A labyrinthine plot explores the possible motives of each of the intriguing (if mostly grotesque) characters, with initially obscure links gradually coalescing. Swarup’s saga packs in plenty of action and this penchant for farce has a cinematic, slapstick quality but the brutally venal Rai dynasty allows plenty of vigorous sniping at India’s endemic political corruption.

 

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

 

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Vikas Swarup
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