A will to kill by R V Raman

A Will to kill by R V Raman

Book Review

Spoilers- None since it is a murder mystery; giving any spoiler is blasphemous! But there are spoilers from Agatha Christie and other authors who specialise in Murder mysteries!

Rating- 3/5

Murder mystery you say? Is it 1989?!!

Why I asked that question you will realise when you read the book!

In any murder mystery you must understand a few baseline rules! First and foremost is that the Killer must not be easy to guess and secondly you must not have too many characters!

One of the best murder mysteries is where the investigator or the police is the murderer! That is a sure winner! This happened with Poirot in his last case! Closer to home, two of Byomkesh stories had police personnels who were investigators turned out to be the culprit! Talk about twist! No wonder Raj in Big Bang Theory calls Byomkesh the Holmes of India! And many bongs will further state that, “Holmes is the Byomkesh of England!”

In Keigo Higashino novels the killer is revealed very early in the story and the bulk of the story then lies in the conception and planing!

The crime king is However Jeffery deaver who makes use of a quadriplegic and solves murders sitting on his bed using only a finger! But now even he has moved on to a moving investigator which is sad for a Rhyme fan like me!

Then you have the James Patterson series where it is just police work to get the killer! Though in Private Delhi and Private India, the Ashwin Collaboration ensured we get sufficient twists and surprise endings!

You can also have multiple murders like in this novel and then you would think in the lines of “And there were none!”! But fret not; here there are only two murders!

Coming closer you are being introduced to a new detective Athreya and this is the first book in the series! I have no idea why this is the in thing now since even Chetan Bhagat has done the same with his latest novel! Hardy men?!! Deaver also has gone this way and you have John Grisham with his Theodore Boone series! Of course most of Robin Cook novels are also infused with murder but he is in a different league nowadays since many times even the investigator gets killed!

If the killer has been introduced and even then the reader could not guess then it is a good murder mystery! In this regard Raman has scored well since there is no way that you could guess the killer even though he or she was introduced in the novel quite early!

But I had guessed the killer fairly early since I have a trick up my sleeve! The killer would be that person who is far far above any suspicion! The one who is so good that he or she is bad! Now take that advice and read and am sure that even you will guess the killer!

So you have an aged rich guy in wheel chair waiting to be killed! You have one and two wills which gets released depending on how the guy dies! Then you of course have a murder! Then you have another one and then you have our Investigator who makes intermittent revelations to see and assess the reaction on everyones faces! I gues that will work only in a soap opera where one dialogue elicits so many emotions! In the present time of being as non human as possible, it is mighty impossible to get somone white or black! Everyone at the end of the day is Grey!

I have read all previous works by Raman and his works like Fraudester, Saboteur, Conspirator and Insider etc and they were also broadly murder mysteries! But the investigaions and the importance given to the current trends was really refreshing! Be it media or social network or banking and finance! This departure is however a big departure to his style. I do hope he will write those other novels also since he was pretty good at it!

For now in the era of smartphone and internet, to read a murder mystery may be a change…or not! That is for you to decide!

So anyone up for an old school whodunit can grab this one! Since to read ‘A will to kill” you need “A big will to read!!”