Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Bhrigu Mahesh PhD - Book reviewed

This novel is based on the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson story format, authored by Nisha Singh.


 A murder mystery being solved by Mahesh Bhrigu Ph.D. (based on the character of Sherlock Holmes) and narrated by Sutte, yes, you guessed it right, based on Dr. Watson’s character but in this case Sutte is a journalist.

The site of the murder is a remote village in India, Senduwar where the villagers experience a windfall when they discover a buried treasure of precious gold jewellery in an abandoned part of the village. But their joy is short-lived as the person who finds it is found dead in mysterious circumstances giving rise to a myth of an evil spirit residing on that precious land.

Mahesh Bhrigu is an ex-cop who has left the forces to practice his craft as a private detective as he felt the Police force cramped his style. He could not bear to see suspects being given the third degree treatment when all it needed were some mind games in which he excelled. But despite him leaving the Police force they relied on him to solve a lot of cases which they could not, hence his decision of starting out on his own was a mutually beneficial one.

Nisha Singh has woven the plot beautifully and the reader is kept guessing till the end. The characterisations of the protagonist and the others in the book too are well thought out.

In the acknowledgements, Nisha Singh has stated that she spent a year in writing the book. I wish she had spent some more time in editing the book too to make it reader friendly. The language she has used is overly flowery and adjectives are crammed in every nook and corner of the book. And to top it she has provided enough ammunition to any grammar Nazi! Possibly she thinks in Hindi and has put it down in directly translated English ignoring the grammar of the English language. Given below are a few glaring examples.

Someone was in a fixture….
Bold over by the logical marvel….
Took a stool and lapsed into it….
Jiyashree got the wind of the news…
Apart from the mowing of the buffaloes….
People were scared of her in her life so were frightened more so in her death.
He went ballistics on a philosopher.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you before.
‘Legend?’ Bhrigu ejaculated ‘What legend?’
This time I reeled and the light of mirth dancing in my eyes was extinguished as if on a switch.
Be you the most reasonable and logical person on the planet…
Humanity struggling to jerk off the thick blankets of gloom.

And the common mistakes these days of ‘there’ for ‘their’ and ‘quiet’ for ‘quite’ to name a few.
Despite being a literature student, she has attributed the authorship of ‘Tale of two cities’ to Leo Tolstoy!
As I said, if only she had paid more time on editing and simple English language the book would have been a winner!
This book seems to be a self-published book hence the lack of professional editing.


This review is a part of the biggest Book Review Program for Indian Bloggers. Participate now to get free books!

1 comment:

  1. The authoress seems to have used Google transliteration for changing her Hindi version to English. All the same, if this book is an interesting mystery, I would like to go for it. Hearty thanks for sharing about it.

    Jitendra Mathur

    ReplyDelete

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