I Met a Man Who Wasn't There by Sakyajit Bhattacharya [Paperback]

Tanaya, a journalist who writes on cold cases, arrives in Darjeeling to investigate the decades-old murder of Amitava Mitra, a young poet. The prime accused was Arun Chowdhury, the victim’s best friend. Arun was released for lack of evidence, and Amitava’s murder has remained unsolved for forty years, the case files buried in the police archives.

Tanaya’s investigations take her around the famed hill station, sleepy and mist-wrapped in the monsoons. She interviews a whole cast of characters, including the taciturn Arun Chowdhury, who is a best-selling crime novelist now. She reconstructs the sequence of events that led to the murder and in doing this, comes across an unpublished crime novel written by Amitava himself that has eerie parallels with his own subsequent murder. As she digs deeper, and the clues get more and more twisted, Tanaya realises there was a devious killer at work here, who killed with impunity. And when Darjeeling witnesses yet another murder, she is convinced the killer is still alive, and hunting.

Published to critical and popular acclaim in Bengali as Shesh Mrito Pakhi, this is crime fiction at its most sophisticated. Weaving in the politics of 1970s Bengal, the lives of poets and the literary scene of the times into a contemporary story of betrayal, murder and revenge, I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There is the work of a compellingly intelligent and entertaining writer.