Inspector Chopra and the Million-Dollar Motor Car: A Baby Ganesh Agency short story

by Vaseem Khan

An enchanting Baby Ganesh Agency short story: a million-dollar car is missing. Chopra has two days to find it, or the gangster who bought it will not be happy.

The Premier No.1 Garage is the place to go in Mumbai if you want a luxury car. Even Mumbai's biggest gangster shops there - he's just ordered a classic race car worth millions.

But now the car is gone. Stolen from a locked room, in the middle of the night.

Who stole it? The mechanic who is addicted to gambling? The angry ex-worker? The car thief pulling off one last job?

And how on earth did they make it vanish from the locked garage?

Inspector Chopra has just days to find the culprit - and the missing car - before its gangster owner finds out ... and takes violent revenge.

• ISBN10: 1473650151
• ISBN13: 9781473650152
• Publish Date: 1 February 2018
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 29 March 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Mulholland Books
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 112
• Language: English

Reviews

[Mystereity Reviews]

I needed an Indian author for one of the r/CozyMystery Book Bingo squares and someone suggested this one. It's novella length, so I was able to read it in an hour or so, but for such a short book, it packed an entertaining plot. Set in Mumbai, India, Chopra is a police inspector who had to retire due to a heart issue but is unwilling to give up the job he loved, he opened a detective agency that runs out of the restaurant he owns. One morning he is visited by a car dealership employee asking Chopra to investigate the theft of a $4 million dollar Mercedes that the dealership procured and customized as a birthday present for the son of a local gangster . If the car isn't found in time to be presented to the ganster's son, there will be trouble.

Despite being just over a hundred pages, this was well plotted and entertaining and it was easy to fall into the book. Chopra is a pragmatic sort of investigator and I loved that he has a baby elephant as a sidekick (that car wash had me giggling!) As other reviewers have said, it wasn't difficult to figure out how the car was stolen, but the culprit turned out to be a surprise. While it was a bare-bones investigation, it was interesting to see how Chopra tracked down every clue and I loved "seeing" the sights and sounds of Mumbai.