In this contemporary Romeo and Juliet story set within India's caste system, private investigator Vish Puri faces his most difficult challenge to date—a high-stakes mystery involving one of India's most controversial commodities: love.
When Ram and Tulsi fall in love, the young woman's parents are dead set against the union. She's from a high-caste family, but her boyfriend is an untouchable from the lowest strata of Indian society. Young Tulsi's father locks her up and promises to hunt down and kill the "lover boy dog." Fortunately, India's Love Commandos, a real-life group of volunteers dedicated to helping mixed-caste couples, come to the rescue. They successfully free Tulsi, but Ram has gone missing.
The task of finding him falls to India's "most private investigator." Unfortunately, Vish Puri is not having a good month. He's already failed to recover the millions stolen from the First National Bank of Punjab; his wallet has been stolen; and worst of all, his arch rival, investigator Hari Kumar, is also trying to locate Ram. To solve the case and reunite the star-crossed lovers, Puri and his team of misfit assistants must infiltrate Ram's village and navigate the caste politics shaped by millennia-old prejudices.
Critics hailed the The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken, the last installment in the Vish Puri Mysteries, as Tarquin Hall's best yet, saying that each book is "more complicated and dangerous than the one before" (Huffington Post). Now, with The Case of the Love Commandos, Hall keeps raising the stakes, delivering more twists, turns, and surprises than ever before.
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“In Hall’s thought-provoking and charming fourth mystery featuring PI Vish Puri a young Delhi couple’s plan to marry runs afoul of the bride’s powerful father, who objects to his future son-in-law’s low caste…This series has dealt with progressively more serious topics, but Hall, the author of Salaam Brick Lane and two other works of nonfiction, hasn’t lost his light touch.”
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Publishers Weekly (starred review)