Black River (2022) by Nilanjana Roy
Good Reads meta-data is 368 pages, rated 4.09 by 503 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: India.
Verdict: G4 (= gritty, gruesome, garish, gory).
Tagline: TMI is not enough.
It opens with the murder of woman and then a child. It gets worse after that. Dirty doings in Delhi ensue. It follows as the night the day the obvious perpetrator did it, and 360 pages later we get to him. Those 360 pages pile on detail after detail of the injustice and oppression and squalor of Indian life for many people, especially for women, so who else could be the villain but a rich oppressor.
A police officer is introduced earlier in the proceedings but I lost track of him in all the G4 tsunami that followed. The policing does reappear about 150 pages later, and I liked the portrayal of both the investigator from Delhi and the local as they assess the situation. But in the end that did not seem integral to the story or the plot or much as the sermon on the evils of the society.