{"id":6479,"date":"2025-06-24T05:27:28","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T12:27:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=6479"},"modified":"2025-06-24T05:27:28","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T12:27:28","slug":"harini-negendra-into-the-leopards-den","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/harini-negendra-into-the-leopards-den\/","title":{"rendered":"Harini Negendra: Into the Leopard’s Den"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bangalore Detectives Club #4<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I love this richly evocative series set in 1920s India. While that country did not achieve independence until 1947, unrest was already bubbling under, with an understandable resentment building toward the British who intruded on their country and culture, trying to remake it in their own image. While Negendra is far from a political writer, she introduces these sentiments into her stories organically, personified in this book by an unpleasant British planter.<\/p>\n

As the story opens, our heroine Kaveri is feeling both confined by her pregnancy and her protective mother-in-law, while missing her husband, Ramu, who is in the state of Coorg attempting to help the people there with their medical needs.\u00a0 Coorg was a big coffee growing region, controlled by the British until independence, and Ramu is staying with a friend who owns a plantation there.<\/p>\n

Kaveri is also drawn into the mysterious death of an old woman who was found dead in her hut on the abandoned circus grounds, clutching a piece of a magazine article praising Kaveri\u2019s prowess as a detective. When Kaveri learns the old woman had visited Coorg right before her death, she knows she must both travel to Ramu and untangle the mystery.<\/p>\n

The clues are sparse, the first one being that someone clearly doesn\u2019t want her investigating. Her friend\u2019s plantation is being crippled by a so-called ghost leopard, and the workers are so afraid of it that they refuse to come to work, causing the coffee beans to go unharvested.\u00a0 As Kaveri gets to know her way around the city, she\u2019s also made aware of the unpleasant Brit, Colonel Boyd, who has acquired swaths of land and imposed his own \u201cscientific\u201d farming methods on them.\u00a0 He\u2019s intensely disliked, to the extent that someone has attempted to kill him, and he asks Kaveri to discover the identity of the culprit.<\/p>\n

While Kaveri doesn\u2019t care much for the Colonel, she also simply can\u2019t resist a mystery.\u00a0 As she delves into the lives of the workers at her friend\u2019s plantation, looks for possible missing relatives or family of the dead woman, and tries to figure out if there really is a ghost leopard, she finds she\u2019s taken on a complex and baffling case \u2013 or maybe several of them.<\/p>\n

Negendra is a very skilful traditional storyteller, and these books are intelligent and well plotted classic mysteries, with the added bonus of the wonderful characters of Kaveri and Ramu.\u00a0 Much like Tana French, she is able to describe a place and a landscape so explicitly it approaches poetry, with the setting becoming an additional rich character. While this book is set in Coorg and not Bangalore, the mountainous terrain and surrounding jungle are so beautifully portrayed that you will feel you have been transported there.<\/p>\n

Kaveri has her \u201cground crew\u201d back in Bangalore looking for clues to the old woman\u2019s death, and the communications with Uma Aunty, her next door neighbor and fellow detective, add spice to the story, especially as she is able to help out with a few crucial pieces to the puzzle.<\/p>\n

The book ends in the way you think it might, with the crime solved and Kaveri\u2019s pregnancy delivered, leaving the reader wondering how efficiently a new mother will be able to investigate crimes in the future.\u00a0 I feel certain she will, and very much look forward to discovering exactly how she\u2019ll do it.\u00a0 This is a beautiful series, one I cannot recommend more highly.\u00a0\u00a0— Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bangalore Detectives Club #4 I love this richly evocative series set in 1920s India. While that country did not achieve independence until 1947, unrest was already bubbling under, with an understandable resentment building toward the British who intruded on their country and culture, trying to remake it in their own image. While Negendra is far … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[108,1109,2151,1012,2150,2152,154],"class_list":["post-6479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1920s-india","tag-bangalore-detectives-club","tag-coffee-plantation","tag-harini-negendra","tag-into-the-leopards-den","tag-leopards","tag-pegasus-crime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6481,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6479\/revisions\/6481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}