I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve fallen in love. Fortunately, there haven’t been a proportionate number of heartbreaks since an overwhelming majority of these have been fictional characters. I spent the last weekend revisiting my fondness for one such memorable individual from someone else’s imagination—Sergeant Wield from Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe series. […]
Books
Week #3: The birthday list
It’s my birthday week so and I usually use that as an excuse to buy myself some books. Here are the books I’m going to buy/have bought me this year: Already waiting in my shelf: The Blind Goddess (Anne Holt): This is the first of the series starring the Norwegian detective Hanne Wilhelmsen. Last year […]
Week #2: Inspector Rebus is back!
(Skip the rambling and go straight to the review of Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin.) Confession time—I am a Rebus-head. Enough of one, in fact, to have orchestrated a trip to Edinburgh just so I could put a face to some of the locations I’d read in Ian Rankin’s series about John […]
Week #1: Ranjit Lal
Do you remember being in school and writing one of those “My favourite author” type of essays? Well—fair warning—this is one such post. Last year, I finally had the nerve to go up and say hello to one of my favourite Indian authors writing for young people, Ranjit Lal. You’d be hard pressed to find […]
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2014 Special: 52 weeks of reading and writing
I’m not quite sure why we get all excited about the new year. Apart from the fact that you have to get used to writing 2014 instead of 2013, nothing’s changed, has it? I, for one, am doing the same thing I was doing at this time yesterday—drinking a cup of tea, sitting at my […]
Review: The Torment of Others
If you’re a reader of crime fiction, you’re likely to have an impassioned opinion on the pair of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. I doubt there is any fictional duo that has frustrated me quite as much as them. Yet, these two creations of Val McDermid’s fertile imagination has me going back again and again […]
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Finding my romantic bone
Rumour has it that I’m a closet romantic. Now, I’m not particularly keen to peddle such sacrilegious nonsense; in fact, I’ll have you know that though I love puppies and kittens, I don’t like flowers and pink and heart-shaped things. Sometimes I like mushy songs—I usually put that down to PMS—but I hate romcoms with […]
There’s a Ghost in My PC: An Excerpt
Now that I’ve finally been given the go-ahead to remove the “forthcoming” tag from There’s a Ghost in My PC, I feel it’s a good time to dangle a carrot. Here’s an excerpt from the book: Kumuda sat on the low wall separating the lawn from the apartment complex’s play area, swinging her legs and […]
Some ghostly news
My new book, There’s a Ghost in My PC is almost ready for publication. Here’s a sneak peak at the cover and blurb: Twelve-year-old Madhu’s laptop houses a ghost. She keeps this a secret—after all, who would believe her if she told them? But her younger sister Kumuda knows something fishy is afoot. She fancies […]
Reginald Hill RIP
On 12 January 2012, one of my favourite authors died: Reginald Hill. He was, of course, best known for his 24 novels starring the redoubtable Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel and his trusted sidekick Detective Sergeant/Inspector/Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe. Hill was 75 and succumbed to a brain tumor. He left a final Dalziel and Pascoe novel […]