The Tender Coconut Tamasha

Book excerpt: FINALIST, PAGE TURNER AWARDS 2020 ***** "Funny and fast-paced crime caper..." ***** "India's answer to Alexander McCall Smith's Mma Ramotswe" ***** "Couldn't put it down" ***** “The future of light crime fiction is Inspector Chatpati” Inspector Hari Chatpati is under pressure. It’s been barely four months since Chatpati helped foil a terrorist attack on the State Parliament. And now his dubious reward is to lead Bangalore’s very first Civil Nuisance Unit, a semi-autonomous police division tasked with tackling minor crime. The CNU is barely operational before it’s inundated with work. There’s a flasher in the park, accosting lone women commuters. Someone has urinated in the fountain at the Planetarium. A criminal syndicate of beggars occupies the pavements. And some vagrant has dumped a load of rubbish outside the house of a prominent politician. As if things weren’t bad enough, Chatpati’s nemesis, the vindictive Assistant Commissioner of Police, orders Chatpati to look into a case deemed too trivial for any other police division: an Austrian traveller hospitalised with food poisoning. What’s so unusual about a tourist suffering from dysentery, anyway? In India, where the potholes can kill you before the samosas can. Chatpati suspects the ACP is out to humiliate him, but the Inspector has no choice but to investigate. It’s not long before the CNU’s investigation sparks widespread rioting and disorder. Bangalore is riven, its markets in flames. The media starts braying for blood, preferably Chatpati’s. Hamstrung and humiliated, the Inspector’s future, and that of his untested team, is at stake. Will they triumph against the unseen forces arrayed against them? The Tender Coconut Tamasha is a fast-paced, often funny mystery for the 21st Century, set in a teeming Indian metropolis where tradition rubs up against modernity at every turn. The book is inspired by Alexander McCall Smith’s Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency and Vaseem Khan’s Inspector Chopra. If you’re looking for a cosy mystery with teeth (but without bite marks) or searching for a break from the conflicted detective chasing a twisted serial killer, this might be the book for you. Trigger warning: contains infrequent, mild profanity and non-explicit depictions of one consensual sexual act between adults (six lines, really, with the only anatomical term being “buttocks”).