“Death in the Deccan” by Aditya Sinha

Death in the Deccan, Aditya Sinha (HarperCollins India, October 2023)

Four people at a Hyderabad newspaper publishing company drop dead from heart attacks on the same day. It’s not impossible that people could have heart attacks on the same day, but the timing seems suspicious to the police, namely the lead investigator, Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mona Ramteke. This is the lead-in of Aditya Sinha’s mystery, Death in the Deccan, a fun and quirky whodunnit that at times could also be used as a cardiology and toxicology primer. 

The title of the book comes from the newspaper, Deccan Testament (a stand-in for the Deccan Chronicle, perhaps), a seventy-five year-old publication that has recently fallen on troubled times. The owners filed bankruptcy in 2017 and two years later an investment firm named the Shrek Fund takes over. Three of the four people who died from heart attacks were members of the Reddy family—two brothers and one of their sons—that had owned the paper. The other victim was a Mr Sai, the head of Human Resources at the newspaper, ie, the person firing people to save money. And for the employees who still work at the paper, many have not been paid in months because of a pandemic slowdown. A couple years after the Reddy family files for bankruptcy, Hyderabad has already gone through four COVID lockdowns.

 

Even though his story is a murder mystery, Sinha uses a lighthearted tone. There is mention of a shell company called Waiting for Godown Pvt. Ltd. In another instance, before he died, Sai, the HR manager, had received a number of threatening emails from anonymous employees. Mona, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, reads through these emails with her assistant, Sub-Inspector Pavani, to try to find more clues. In one letter, a anonymous group writes:

 

The company has closed several centres and terminated many colleagues. Many innocent heads have rolled. It is now time for the guilty heads to roll. The management is nothing but a gang of dacoits.
      Yours, The victims of the Deccan Dacoits.

 

      ‘Deccan Dacoits’ sound like a Twenty-20 cricket team,’ Mona noted.
      ‘Ma’am, these could only have been written by journalists.’

 

As Mona investigates these different motives—job terminations, unpaid salaries, and a dislike of the former owners that drove the paper into the ground—she learns of new details in the case. The medical examiner finds that Sankatram Reddy, one of the brothers that had owned the paper, was injected with 160 to 180mm of air. When this air entered his artery, it induced cardiac arrest. Definitely murder. It isn’t easy to figure this out, the medical examiner tells Mona.

 

‘We did an x-ray  of the pulmonary arteries and confirmed it with a transoesophageal echocardiogram,’ Dr. Dharma said. ‘So we searched for an entry point for the air and found it camouflaged by an old burn injury on his neck. Who knows how he got burnt there! I can tell you one thing though. Whoever killed him knew the injury existed. The killer probably knew the victim intimately.’

 

As the story and the investigation continue, Mona learns of the Reddy family’s plans to start other enterprises like an airline and a COVID vaccine distributor. The recent pandemic figures largely into the story.

 

The feeling of isolation worsened when the lockdown began to lift in stages and people cautiously stepped out of their homes, in masks though. Wearing masks was critical, but it hindered Mona in reading faces, even those of unknown passers-by, something fundamental to her job. She had always relied on looking into a pair of eyes and was beginning to realize that the nose and mouth were equally fundamental to self-expression.

But some of the characters toss around unfortunate vaccine conspiracy theories and make disparaging remarks about China in the second half of the book. They aren’t integral to the plot and come across as somewhat gratuitous. A slightly firmer editor might have removed these distractions to an otherwise lighthearted murder mystery.


Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.