Danger lurks in the pages of this compilation filled with men and women, ruthless and dangerous in their motives to satiate the egos with revenge and murder. But is there a perfect murder? Read and find out for yourself!
Ruskin Bond, resident of Mussoorie, is a well-known writer of fiction and a raconteur par excellence. His Tales and Legends from India, Angry River, Strange Men, Strange Places, The Blue Umbrella, A Long Walk for Bina and Hanuman to the Rescue are also available in Rupa paperback. The Ruskin Bond's Children's Omnibus has been a firm favourite with young readers for several years. Ghost Stories from the Raj, The Rupa Book of Great Animal Stories, The Rupa Book of True Tales of Mystery and Adventure, The Rupa Book of Himalayan Tales and The Rupa Book of Great Suspense Stories are some of his recent books for Rupa.
Ruskin Bond is an Indian author of British descent. He is considered to be an icon among Indian writers and children's authors and a top novelist. He wrote his first novel, The Room on the Roof, when he was seventeen which won John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written several novellas, over 500 short stories, as well as various essays and poems, all of which have established him as one of the best-loved and most admired chroniclers of contemporary India. In 1992 he received the Sahitya Akademi award for English writing, for his short stories collection, "Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra", by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters in India. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 for contributions to children's literature. He now lives with his adopted family in Landour near Mussoorie.
Another anthology from the wonderful Ruskin Bond, surely makes the reading worth it. All stories selected have either humour or Surprise apart from being a thriller full-on suspense, bit of horror, some weirdness but always the best writing literature wise. The amount of pain taken for collating this is seen by the way the stories differ even maintaining the genre. The ever trusted Ruskin Bond doesn't disappoint the reader and comes up with a collection you can read again years later and still find it interesting and fresh even though the stories are from a gone by era.
When I was buying this book, the list of authors who’s stories are in this collection didn’t look very impressive, most of them are authors who are no longer well known today. But given the praise from Ruskin Bond in his introductory note for both the stories and their authors, I decided to take a chance. After all, it is a collection of short crime stories so how wrong could it go? But my opinion changed after reading the very first story and then it was just a matter of a few hours before I had finished all of them. The stories in this collection are excellent – the crimes are devious and very cleverly conceived. The first story – Death At The Wicket – will appeal to lovers of cricket – its an ingeniously engineered murder of a batsman. Query describes the agony of a man wrongly accused and jailed of murder, but its the manner in which he proves his point that makes this story interesting. In A Considerable Murder everyone has a reason to kill the old codger, but who’s successful in the end? These and other stories, including a nice one by Ruskin Bond himself, make up this wonderful selection.