People die, wherever you go Mr Chauhan.
The Missing Husband
by Vijay Medtia
Genre: Detective Mystery
About: Abhay Chauhan is offered a lucrative case. A wealthy family is being blackmailed and the culprits seem to be amateurs. It should be an easy (and much needed) payday for Chauhan. But the family have other secrets. A failed marriage has ended with a missing husband and the answer could have something to do with the blackmailers...
The Good
The story is told in first person and Chauhan's personality really comes across on the page. I was easily drawn to his character. He's this cool charmer who isn't afraid to break rules or burn bridges to solve the case. Chauhan is utterly unfazed by death threats or likely beatings and chases down criminals to the point of recklessness. And he has clear moral standards, he won't accept easy money by hunting down cheating spouses or get involved with clients. Above all, he's incorruptible and I really liked seeing him turn down the offers of money or sex or a new job - things the people bribing him expected him to beg for and be grateful for when offered.
The novel's voice exactly matched the character and gave a fun, entertaining vibe to unravelling the mystery. The mystery was also good. The missing husband, Prem, was an interesting character to me and I truly did feel invested in finding out what had happened to him.
The Bad
The female characters were All. The. Same. Shanti, Maya and Anita were given exactly the same characteristics and had the same interactions with Chauhan. All three were beautiful women who expected Chauhan to do what they wanted and, when he didn't, would fly into a fit of rage before going back to insincere flirtations and trying to win him over with offers of money or sex. There was no distinction in any of the relationships. The women in this novel were simply there to be femme fatales.
The bad guys didn't get a much better treatment. They were either amateurs (soon killed off) or big bosses that were all bark and no bite. Kasim was hyped up as the scariest person you'd ever meet, but his actions in the story were hardly the stuff of nightmares and he had no real presence once we finally did meet him. In fact he was dealt with by Chauhan fairly easily. The same goes for Bakshi. The big boss in this story threatened Chauhan a lot, but in the end he was apprehended quickly by the police. Chauhan got into many dangerous situations and yet none of the bad guys were able to do any serious damage to him.
I hated the way clues were used. Chauhan was hired to get the blackmail photos of Anita but the way everyone was so desperate to get the photos (and the photographer killed before we had a chance to meet him) made me think that the photos showed more than just Anita in her underwear. I thought something interesting would have turned up in the negatives to make those photos more than they seemed. But no. Chauhan discovered nothing in them. The red book was also barely used. All I remember Chauhan getting from it was Khan's initials. The rest of the information Chauhan got to solve the case came from talking to people. This is a technique I dislike in detective fiction because it doesn't show much skill from the detective, except the ability to bluff and guess correctly. It made sense for Chauhan to interrogate Santana and Khan - two guys who would buckle under pressure, but why he tried to get information out of Bakshi without evidence or a clever plan made no sense.
The Somewhat Iffy
Some of the reveals felt weakly executed. Such as MD being a spy. Maya complained of Bakshi having knowledge of everything she said or did a page before the reveal of MD working for Bakshi. This idea of being spied on could have been given to the reader earlier in the story (perhaps when Maya and Chauhan were brief allies at Rubies). We didn't have to know Maya was working with Bakshi at that point, but to have given her character some paranoia would have made a spy reveal a lot more impactful at the end.
Chauhan had no life outside of the case. His background was mentioned and I think that really added to his character - I felt like I understood why he got into detective work and how he became the person he was. However, his actual day to day life had no colour to it. Who were his friends? Lovers? He didn't seem to get a lot of work so what did he typically do when he wasn't working? I didn't get a sense of his normal life, only his working one.
Overall
The detective voice of this novel was great. I really loved Chauhan as the main character and the case he was on was interesting. However, clues were underutilised and too many of the characters fit the same purpose.
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