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DI Harry Virdee: 6’3. Rugby juggernaut. Religious renegade. Disgraced cop. Hothead.Streets of Darkness, the first novel of the DI Virdee series, introduces us to this sociopathic maverick.In Bradford, routinely compared to Gotham City for its crime and filth, the ethnic divide runs deep. With the statistic tilting towards the ‘outsiders’, the city is a synecdoche to contemporary society, where only the trigger-happy thug lives to see a new day. Bradford has always been a cesspool of ethnic clashes—a tinderbox ready to erupt at the slightest nudge. With far too many incidents in the past for comfort, the palpable hatred is everywhere, seeping into the psyche of the residents and making them suspicious and edgy. Drugs are rampant, syndicates run open empires, survival is a luxury…

Anjana Neira Dev (AND): Every journey begins with an upheaval, a crisis or even a cataclysm that changes our life and the direction it has been taking. Would you share with us the beginning of your journey as a creative writer?

Sophie Hannah (SH): It’s hard for me to pinpoint a precise starting point because writing is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember; writing stories and poems was my hobby as a child and, because my mum was a writer, it always seemed a very natural and normal thing for me to be doing…

The Blood Divide by AA Dhand is an unconventional detective thriller as it traverses the length of the book only to arrive at a Sisyphean point at the narrative’s start—the prologue. The book is divided into two parts with a Prologue; part one plays out in Britain and in part two the story progresses in India. It has a constant pace and keeps up with the quest for more as multiple interesting and functional characters enter the drama and die or disappear leaving the plot more layered which renders the narration of intense suspense and intrigue…

If the rave reviews this book has garnered globally on Amazon are any indication this is an instant buy. Two qualities appear to be commonly appreciated by most readers: the readability of the book, and the insights that readers—especially those who have never been to India and know little about its people and culture—glean about India (and Mumbai) from the book. The Baby Ganesh series with Inspector Chopra as the detective, and his elephant, Ganesha, appears to have captured the attention and adulation of a global audience…

Anuja Chauhan’s Club You to Death is set around a seemingly simple murder that takes place in the Delhi Turf Club, a space for a certain set of people with privileges who believe that they are the glamourous last standing piece that will protect Delhi from falling at the hands of what they term to be the ‘ills of modernity’. The Club has an intricate system of rules set in an even more intricately mapped area that is populated by members who subscribe to the power and luxury that comes along with having a membership card…

Raagam Taanam Pallavi is a recent addition to Kalpana Swaminathan’s books of detective fiction which includes other works such as Cryptic Death and Other Stories (1997), Pa (2003), The Page 3 Murders (2006), Greenlight (2017) and Murder in Seven Acts (2018). As the cover page suggests, the present novel is ‘A Lalli Mystery’; the lead character of this novel is Lalli, a sexagenarian detective who has been a recurring figure in seven of Kalpana Swaminathan’s previous works since 1997…