I refuse to believe the author wrote this without a thesaurus by his side. Purple to the extreme.

Police story with vampires and lycans brewing war in New Delhi, it started good but there's a part where a trigger warning should have been mentioned like in the preface or even in here in Goodreads I guess I was caught off guard, it was poetically told between these trio in the police force solving cases but revolving with a crime of someone taking a finger from its victim other than that I can't recalled anything else.

Ok, so don't let the middle of the road stars fool you -- this is an excellently well written book. It's an astonishing portrait of Delhi and of a very specific time. It's also a compelling, noir-ish mystery with intertwining, episodic vignettes of violence and political manipulation.

Because it is all of those things, it is not really to my taste -- I found the drifting, nonlinear storytelling to be intriguing, but not satisfying.

In general, I enjoy crime stories from other countries because the good ones often contains a good social history beneath the genre trappings. This New Delhi-set book certainly seeks to do this, but neither aspect was successful enough to hold my sustained interest. It's built around a series of crimes over the course of a year or so: a gang of nine-fingered men running amok in the city, the murder of an African drug dealer and his girlfriend, the kidnapping of a child from an elite daycare. The three main characters are a contrasting trio perfectly in keeping with the genre: Deputy Commissioner Dayal is the witty, urbane, sharp-minded leader of the crack police investigative team, with his grizzled veteran head-cracker Kapoor at his side to do the dirty work (or call upon his vast network of "cousins" to do so), and fresh-faced, tech-savvy female copy Smita.

As a crime procedural, it doesn't really work that well because while the heroes do some work, they're also handed a lot of leads and tips, often via the fourth main character -- a beautiful woman named Razia, who may or may not be a centuries-old vampire. It's through this character that the theme of the city's layers of history are introduced and returned to over and over. It's in that context that the modern elite of India are high relief as money and power-hungry materialists with no souls who live side by side with, but walled off from, the poor and desperate.

All in all, the book just didn't work for me -- it was all to easy to put down for weeks at a time. At the same time, I can see how it might resonate very strongly with someone who lives in, or has visited New Delhi. It's been about twenty years since I read it, but I would imagine this would be a good book to read in conjunction with William Darlwrmple's nonfiction book [b:City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi|124430|City of Djinns A Year in Delhi|William Dalrymple|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327731460s/124430.jpg|119825].