The Case of the Missing Servant

Vish Puri's New Delhi detective agency has never been busier, often doing background checks on persons selected for arranged marriages. With his keen skills of observation and deduction, a network of personal contacts, and some modern communication devices, Punjabi Puri claims to be his country's top detective, citing his Super Sleuth award from the World Federation of Detectives for solving the Case of the Missing Polo Elephant in 1999. (He also has an appetite for pakoras and 30 excess pounds and is known to family and friends as Chubby.) A prominent lawyer who asks Puri to find a missing servant is arrested for the young woman's murder when her body is found, requiring complex work by Puri's staff. Meanwhile, he must check out the squeaky-clean fiancA© of the granddaughter of a revered war hero. And Puri's visiting Mummy-ji undertakes her own search when her son is shot at. In his fiction debut, British journalist Hall (To the Elephant Graveyard)-who lives in London and New Delhi-captures his second country with grace and humor and creates a protagonist able to put more cases in his "conclusively solved" cabinet. An entertaining start (complete with expletives-included glossary) to a promising series.