Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of The Mussoorie Murders by Divyaroop Bhatnagar

There are books that quietly sit beside you on a long train journey, letting the landscape blur past while your thoughts stay undisturbed. And then there are books that jolt you out of your seat — books that make you forget your station is about to arrive. The Mussoorie Murders belongs entirely to the second kind. I opened it thinking it would be a light companion for the ride. Instead, I found myself standing at the train door long after the train had stopped, convinced even the cool breeze carried a clue. The book didn’t just ask to be read — it demanded to be decoded.

Divyaroop Bhatnagar — Debu to the readers who know his warmth — brings something rare to Indian detective fiction. There’s a certain confidence in his storytelling, the kind that comes from someone who has walked Mussoorie’s slopes, breathed its mist, heard its pine trees whisper old gossip. His narrative swings between 1909 and 1973, and yet he never loses grip. It’s like watching someone juggle antique glass globes without a single tremor.

At the centre of it all lies an elegant, old-school locked-room mystery. In 1909, Margaret Maynard Liddell is found murdered inside a room bolted from the inside — an impossible crime that startles the British establishment and draws the interest of none other than Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sixty-odd years later, an heiress, Anahita Bilimoria, is discovered dead in eerily similar circumstances. Two women separated by decades, two rooms that shouldn’t have allowed death to walk in, and one man determined to untangle the pattern: Avijit Sikdar, a mathematics professor turned Oxford-schooled detective who sees the world not as it appears, but as it quietly aligns.

What truly impressed me wasn’t merely the premise — it was the way Bhatnagar builds Mussoorie itself. Not on paper, but in your senses. I could taste the cold fog rolling down Camel’s Back Road, hear pine cones cracking under unseen footsteps, feel the dusk settling on colonial rooftops like a half-kept secret. If Ruskin Bond gave us the Mussoorie of gentle afternoons and childhood warmth, Bhatnagar gives us the Mussoorie where shadows lean in too close and windows hold their breath.

The book shifts between the two timelines with surprising grace. Instead of confusing, it feels like peeling wallpaper in an old British-era lodge — layers revealing layers, each older and more fragile than the one before. The suspense doesn’t leap at you; it tightens slowly, like someone turning a key in the dark and waiting for your reaction.

Avijit Sikdar stayed with me long after I closed the book. He isn’t a flamboyant genius or a tortured soul — he is something better: believable. A man who trusts reason but doesn’t underestimate instinct. A man who reads Doyle not for escapism but for guidance. Even the people orbiting him — the tense husband, the enigmatic housekeeper, the self-styled godman — carry the unmistakable scent of secrets. In mysteries, side characters often feel like furniture; here, every one of them feels like a locked drawer.

What surprised me was the emotional depth beneath the puzzle. There are quiet moments in the book — small, almost invisible reflections — on loneliness, on appearances, on the kind of silence money can buy. At one point, I found myself remembering something my father once told me: “Time doesn’t erase, beta — it only rearranges.” The two murders, separated by more than six decades, felt exactly like that: rearrangements of a grief that refused to die.

If I were to offer one gentle critique, it’s this: I wanted a couple of secondary characters to be explored a shade deeper. Not because the book lacks anything, but because I found myself wanting to know them better. And the ending, while beautifully delivered, arrives like a sudden mountain gust — you’re stunned, but you wish you’d had a second more to brace.

But these are ripples on an otherwise still lake. The strengths glow: the atmosphere, the dual-timeline structure, the elegant prose, the seamless interplay of history and imagination, and the reverence for the golden age of mystery without ever slipping into imitation. Bhatnagar writes like someone lighting a candle in a dark cabin — slow, deliberate, revealing just enough to make you lean forward.

By the time I finished the book, I realised something I’ve believed for years but rarely articulate: good mysteries aren’t about discovering who did it — they’re about discovering why humans do what they do. This novel understands that truth deeply.

If atmospheric thrillers, historical puzzles, or literary mysteries are your comfort zone — or even if you simply enjoy the delicious unease of a story that keeps its last breath hidden — The Mussoorie Murders deserves a permanent place on your shelf. Somewhere close to Doyle. Somewhere near Christie. And definitely next to a cup of hot cocoa, for emotional insurance.

And perhaps, after reading it, you’ll think twice before walking into a room with windows that can’t be opened from the outside.

#TheMussoorieMurders #DivyaroopBhatnagar #BookReview #IndianAuthors #MysteryBooks #MurderMystery #MustReadBooks #BookRecommendations #ReadersOfIndia #BookstagramIndia #SameerGudhate #thebookreviewman