I would like to applaud the publisher of this 400pp murder mystery for GIVING AWAY THE MURDERER ON THE BACK COVER OH MY GOD. (This is my pb edition, the Goodreads blurb has been altered as well you might hope. JFC.)

Ahem. Other than that.

Nice idea, patchy execution. The "India shown in a series of different lives of characters who turn out to intersect" thing isn't super original but there's plenty of space for good treatment of it. This wasn't really. In part because the stories all seemed to be from different books. There's a magical realist satire of a guy possessed by Gandhi, a gritty gangster type tale, a tragedy of dispossessed and discarded underclass, a Bollywood actress in a Bollywood plot, and a spectacularly poor effort at a caricature of the American Abroad. It didn't add up.

It didn't really work for me as satire or as realism because I found the tone too uneven--I'm here for tragicomedy but I think once it's caricature you do lose the emotional weight. And it didn't really work as a murder mystery because DID I MENTION THE BACK COVER FFFFF.