A police officer’s murder is reinvestigated in Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari’s new novel

A smart criminal who fools the whole shebang is an invention of the movies. There is no such thing as a perfect murder. There is planning and communication, surveillance cameras and unexpected witnesses. There is physical struggle and trace evidence. There is science and technology. There is family and friends and colleagues and foes and sexual partners and secret emotions. There is motive. Even in a case of corpus delicti there is an invisible history to it, a coherent road to reconstruct until the coherence is broken, a ghost to point your finger at. They always leave things behind.

It is said that every crime awaits its investigator, every cold case its reinvestigation. You can never know whether the case is yours, of course, but before nodding yes to your superior, you’d do well to pause and appreciate the previous investigation because in the reopening of a cold case nothing is more central than a robust understanding of the previous investigation. In other words, it is important to investigate the investigation.

Vijay Menon – inspector general, Crime Branch, North Zone, Kerala Police – sighed deeply and paused his thoughts and sipped his taro bubble tea. He had some of the files from the...

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