The Tender Coconut Tamasha

"Funny and fast-paced crime caper..."

"India's answer to Alexander McCall Smith's Mma Ramotswe"

"Couldn't put it down"

“The future of light crime fiction is Inspector Chatpati”



Inspector Hari Chatpati, reluctant hero of the Bangalore Police Service, is under pressure. The city is riven by rioting and disorder, its markets in flames. The media are baying for blood. His.

Newly appointed to head the very first Civil Nuisance Unit, Chatpati already had his hands full chasing flashers in the park and deterring public urination when his nemesis, the vindictive Assistant Commissioner, orders the CNU to investigate a case that no other police division would touch.

What was so unusual about a tourist suffering from food poisoning anyway? In India. Where the potholes can kill you before the samosas can.

But, as the Inspector discovers, conspiracy lurks within mundanity.

Hamstrung and humiliated, the Inspector's future, and that of his untested team, is at stake.

Will they triumph against the unseen forces arrayed against them?



The Tender Coconut Tamasha is a fast-paced, often funny mystery for the 21st Century, set in a teeming Indian metropolis where tradition rubs up against modernity at every turn. Dark humour and light grit are at play on the stage of a New Emerging India, a nation of nations rumbling forward into the future while history clings to its wheels.



The book is inspired by Alexander McCall Smith's Number One Ladies' Detective Agency and Vaseem Khan's Inspector Chopra. If you're looking for a cosy mystery with teeth (but without bite marks) or searching for a break from the conflicted detective chasing a twisted serial killer, this might be the book for you.



Trigger warning: contains infrequent, mild profanity and non-explicit depictions of one consensual sexual act between adults (six lines, really, with the only anatomical term being "buttocks").