Putting up a few short posts about books I haveenjoyed in the past year, which I have mentioned elsewhere but not here.One of them is RudraneilSengupta’s crime novel The Beast Within, about a police investigation centredaround a suspicious death in Delhi’s Panchshila Park. (This, incidentally, hitsa 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 amurder.)

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

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

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