A short recommendation: The Beast Within

Putting up a few short posts about books I have enjoyed in the past year, which I have mentioned elsewhere but not here. One of them is Rudraneil Sengupta’s crime novel The Beast Within, about a police investigation centred around a suspicious death in Delhi’s Panchshila Park. (This, incidentally, hits a little too close to home, given that I have a new flat in that colony *and* there has been a spate of crime in Panchshila in recent times, including a murder.)

The Beast Within isn’t a mystery so much as a procedural that goes in many different directions, with a team of cops having to deal with – among other things – pressure and bullying from the well-heeled and the well-connected. I particularly liked the pacing and the continuous shift of perspectives between the policemen (and one policewoman, the book’s most endearing character, a former wrestler named Meera Kumari), with their approach to the investigation being rooted in their backgrounds, biases and personalities.

I couldn’t attend all of Rudraneil’s recent book discussion (featuring author Madhulika Liddle and Monika Bhardwaj, the first woman DCP in the Delhi Crime Branch – a pic from that here) but I did get to briefly meet him there. We had first been in touch during Covid times because of our shared activities in street-animal care, and the book has a couple of passages where Meera – an animal-friend herself – explodes at people who are ranting about the “stray dog menace”. Very relatable. Lara (seen above), Chameli and others would like this fictional woman cop, I think.