I am reviewing the thriller novel Private India by James Patterson et al which is set in Mumbai and is a very good novel that I bought from a local bookstore. This book is part of the Private about a detective agency that is the biggest in the world and serves only very wealthy clients. It has more resources for solving crime than the police especially in India. It’s a story that’s quite glamorous and of course in most of the installments they do a different city each time. Jack Morgan the CEO of Private is the connecting thread and has a small part in this book. I think this is one of the better installments in the series. Santosh the head of Private India has a drink problem but some years ago investigated a series of bombings on trains which all went off soon after each other and all departed from the same station. He failed to solve that case but it brought him into contact with Jack Morgan who was impressed with him and offered him a job at Private India. Now there is a series of murders with a garotte where the victim is strangled having been sent a yellow silk kind of rope prior to the event and there are various items left next to the body. In times past there was a group in India called thags where the English word thug comes from and these people used to gain the trust of people mostly on pilgrimages and murder them at a suitable moment when they were least expecting it. These thugs were wiped out by the English who could investigate a crime and due to their being a pattern found they could predict these attacks. There appears to be a cell of these thugs still operating although they are operating outside the rules of conduct these thugs used to use. It is connected to the series of bombings he investigated. The trail leads to the madam of a brothel who tidies up forensically after each murder and had high up clients so that when they arrested her on very serious charges rather strangely they got dropped. It is a good that perhaps would only work in an Indian setting. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it.
