In Samyukta Bhowmick’s novel A Fatal Distraction, not all is as it seems. At the discovery of twin murders in the heart of Delhi, the scaffolding of lies and half-truths that hold up high society life begins to shake, and when the dust settles, many stories will have come undone and trusty gossip set straight.
The drama beneath the surface
The Delhi Daily is a family-owned newspaper, and much like most traditional media, fast turning into a loss-making machine. Its owners, the Kapoors, have long been benevolent patrons, but family entanglements have begun to turn messy. At a book launch party one crackling evening, DB, the editor of the Delhi Daily drops dead, seemingly out of nowhere. This puts every tense interaction at the party under a microscope, and while the list of suspects is still taking shape, another body turns up – Anika Kapoor, the chief suspect herself.
Media attention shoots through the roof, and soon everyone has something to say, a finger to point. Back in the office of the Delhi Daily, an unlikely alliance forms: Mridula and Monami, who are until this point colleagues, but not quite friends. Monami is young and all guns blazing, captivated by all the details in the case that don’t fit. Mridula is the no-nonsense office veteran, grieving her close friend DB by pouring her energy into finding his culprit.
Bhowmick has a talent for painting characters who feel entirely real, as though they could walk straight off the page and into your life. You can place them by their mannerisms alone – in the light that seems to go out of their eyes when they talk about a past life, or when temptation seems to pass through their limbs, almost moving them into excitement. Their designs are neither obviously transparent nor ridiculously twisted – their motivations are simply born out of their histories, their emotional responses a fractured reflection of their humanity. A quiet drama bubbles beneath the surface.
Our two lead women have all the spunk that makes a good detective – astute, curious, fierce – so when they are plagued by doubt or hesitate and watch their step, you want to stick with them; funny and fallible, their growing friendship is the highlight of many scenes. The ensemble cast of Delhi Daily around them is colourful and often provides a texture to the developing story, providing moments of both levity and tension as we slowly build up to the climax.
Spunk and funk
But what I found missing, most of all, is the tension that is required to take the story of another death and infuse it with the fascination of a murder mystery. At several points in the novel, the reader is left wondering: why do I care? Much is at stake here, we are told: money, fame, power. But even a familiar world must be outlined just so that the readers find themselves immersed in it. In A Fatal Distraction, the characters, while varied in their motivations and rich in quirks, are never quite put in relation to each other in a way that makes their fates matter to the reader. The dark intrigue around the characters’ secrets and the investigation that ensues in the wake of the murders feels more like a procedural than a thrilling unravelling of their lives.
This inability to evoke pathos cuts another way too. To my mind, a good murder mystery must tread the fine line between making the death of a character feel consequential without making the mood of the text too morbid for the reader to find any quick escape into it; impressing the impact of the death for the plot has to be balanced with the fun of putting together the puzzle of how it happened. Unfortunately, A Fatal Distraction struggles with this balance. The two deaths that set in motion the events that form the story are significant, but it seemed to me that the novel’s tone leaned too heavily into a detached, sometimes amused examination of events in the aftermath.
Events in A Fatal Distraction unfold briskly, and as the novel moves from one revelation to the next, the narrative momentum remains high and the reader engaged. This pacing prevents the story from stagnating, and as Mridula and Monami find themselves entrenched deeper and deeper in the search for their culprit, the twists and turns ensure that the reader’s attention is held.
Ultimately, A Fatal Distraction has all the right ideas for a delicious murder mystery, but it does not end up fully capitalising on its premise. Offering a sharp critique of media and society, and employing a colourful cast of characters to drive the hypocrisies of this world home, it makes for a breezy read. Even if not entirely captivated, readers will find themselves entertained by Bhowmick’s sharply observant story and its many compelling twists.
A Fatal Distraction, Samyukta Bhowmick, Juggernaut.
