Review of Sriram Chellapilla’s novel – A Useful Death
- Title – A useful Death
- Author – Sriram Chellapilla
- Format – Paperback
- Print length – 416 pages
- Publishers – Westland (20 May 2019)
- Price- INR 399/-
Aspiring actress Priya is dead. It’s a suicide, and rumour has it that Anil, son of politician and former Telugu-movie superstar Mohan Krishna, drove her to it. Just another film-industry scandal? Or something bigger, much bigger?
Partha, hired by Mohan Krishna’s family to handle the crisis, thinks so. Why won’t such a powerful father defend his son, Partha wonders. Is there an intra-family war? Whose interests are playing out in the media and on social media? Is a political game afoot or is this all connected to Mohan Krishna’s own dubious past? And why are student unions getting involved?
Even as Partha and his associates, Seema and Harish, confront the ethics of being involved in a war with no heroes, they are drawn into a dangerous hunt. They must negotiate a tangled and vicious world to answer one question: a young woman is dead—to whom is her death useful?
This is the story where Partha and his team work to identify what drove the aspiring actress Priya to commit suicide.
Her laptop and mobile phone goes missing and various people are blamed for its disappearance. Partha works discretely to find out the mystery surrounding Priya’s death and tries to locate the missing gadgets.
The story starts in a leisurely pace and then after one third of the book, it becomes a page turner!
You get to know the inside life of people involved in politics and the film industry. It also shows you how the college or University molds the minds of gullible students who take in every word of the Professors as if it was the truth. Also what happens when the teacher himself is responsible for several untoward incidents is clearly written in this book.
Naxalism, Leftists views, students getting involved in politics, an innocent guy and his mentality after being framed for a murder he had no connection to, the struggles of upcoming or aspiring artists in the film industry, politics,media’s role in the society are some of the things that are expertly brought out in this book.
The language is simple and easy to follow. In some of the places, I felt the description could have been cut short which in turn would have accelerated the reading speed.
I felt the cover could have been a little better.
Overall a good thriller with a lot of suspense and the ending / reason for Priya’s suicide is not something that you would have imagined it to be!
Sriram Chellapilla is a writer and screenwriting lecturer. He has a Masters in Communication and lives and works in Hyderabad. His first novel The Long Reverie of Partha Sarma (Penguin India) was published in 2006.
Looking for Cookbook / Fiction Recommendation? Check out the 80+ books that I have reviewed so far in the Book Reviews page