Five men are on their way to a hill station, where Ramola, a fading movie star, waits for them to make an announcement that will change their lives forever. Ramola withdrew from the public eye at the peak of her stardom. Now, surrounded by retired couples spending their twilight years gardening and gossiping, her life is idyllic. Or at least it was, till the night of her birthday party, when she announces that her tell-all memoir will soon be published. The book, documenting her rise to fame, puts each of her ex-lovers' careers in jeopardy. As each desperate man tries to save himself, Ramola is drawn back into the very web of lies and deception she'd left behind. By the time the party is over, Ramola's neighbour, retired army officer and amateur sleuth, Colonel Arjun H. Acharya, has found his first murder to solve. A Closetful of Skeletons reels you into a cosy world of fresh mountain air, long-drawn bridge games and bloody murder.
Reviews
Sakal Times
13 January, 2018
Five men are on their way to a hill station, where Ramola, a fading movie star, waits to make an announcement that will change their lives forever — reads the jacket of A Closetful of Skeletons. Uhuh. Is it something like Sunset Boulevard (film), we thought.
The similarities are there — the protagonist is a fading star, and the book serves some delicious gossip, the insecurities and cut-throat competition that prevails in the film world. But Ramola, unlike Norma (the ageing star in Sunset Boulevard) doesn’t live under any illusion that she is going to make a grand come-back. She is happy with the world she has created in Ramsar, a hill-station in up north, pursuing other interests, living a secluded, but not a lonely life.
But her past does have a presence in her present. Ramola has written her autobiography — ‘exposé’ being the right term. And, she has invited five men, from her past, to celebrate her new project. However, the men get jittery when they hear about the book. They have got everything to lose if their exploits become public knowledge. No wonder then that two days after the announcement of the book, Ramola is found murdered.
This opens up the trail of whos, whys and hows with ASP Tim Thapa and Colonel Acharya trying to outwit the killer/s. In the process, they figure out the enigmatic persona of Ramola, who is described variously by her detractors as ‘hard as nails’, ‘cold’, ‘calculating’ and ‘selfish’.
For a thriller mystery to click with the readers, it has to be fast-paced and a page turner. A Closetful of Skeletons is a page-turner, but the pace lags a bit when the author tries to set up a scene too lavishly. And, yet when the climax comes, the reader is in for a surprise. All our guesswork results in a naught. The credit is due to the author, whose first attempt at writing a thriller, gets a thumbs up.
The Pioneer
A Closetful of Mystery
Sunday, 08 April 2018 | AMRITA VARMA | in Agenda
This balanced murder mystery keeps the rational wheels in the reader’s head churning without overly violent or graphic description, says AMRITA VARMA
A good murder mystery, on a cold winter night, with a cup of warm coffee and your mind buzzing with visions and images of stories untold, is pure bliss, if one has experienced it. This particular one does justice to that experience without being aggressively graphic and violent in its expression. The novel itself travels from the fast — paced cinematic visions of the lives of the who’s who of Bollywood with all its masala, moving to life in a cottage of an idyllic village in the Himalayas with its laid back peaceful surroundings. The protagonist, Ramola, who is an immensely successful actress, carries the story through her relative struggle in the film industry from her liaisons with men and brushes with the casting couch, to her shift to limelight and then to a life of relative recluse which she has enjoyed immensely in the recent past.
One gets a fantastic experience of the beauty and serenity of life in the hills and its slow pace where leisurely pursuits are the order of the day. Coming back to Mumbai, the characters are presented in the first few chapters one after another. The psychological make up, frustrations, tensions, emotional associations and their expectations with the protagonist can be sensed which are further re instated through the novel. Meanwhile, in the hamlet of Ramsar, Ramola has been writing an autobiography with the help of a young journalist who resides with her. They plan a launch of sorts by inviting each of the characters that have been an integral part of her story to her 40th birthday party in the hills. To add to it is an audience of the local judge, retired army officer, doctor, policeman/ detective and their families who are the local neighbours and the servants in all their ji hazoori, hard work, alcoholic abandon and careless gossip. The stage is set for murder. Let the games begin.
What is interesting is the relative ease with which Podder flows from one character to another and binds the mystery where not only can one experience what each entity is going through internally, but also its external manifestations in their behavior while keeping the secret of the possible murderer/s under strict lock and key. One seems to go through a parallel detective game along with the colonel and the detective/ policeman who play the part of the Sherlock — Watson duo in its classic style with aplomb. As it happens in the hills, one finds beautiful depictions of everyday life, the walks through the hills, those lovely, homely cottages with flowering creepers on walls and the surrounding cottages with their inhabitants sitting in their gardens basking in the sun and the views and idle talk which exists in places where there is less to do and more time to kill. The entire novel is peppered with such visuals and it is commendable how Podder has built the story gradually weaving it with these detailed panoramic depictions so much so that the reader actually feels transported there and one can feel the crisp mountain air and the chirping of the birds!
While the novel runs in a racy manner like a Doyle novel with intrigue around every bend, the familiar idyllic countryside plays well with the contradictions between time and space. There is too much excitement for a hill town, which in a humourous way, gives something to the local people living there to do and think about while all the city dwellers who have thronged the hills for their various vested reasons enjoy the bounties of nature and rest, ironically around the stage where the murder is set! In doing so, the characters though very realistic, gain strains of a comic identity through their respective circumstances and actions. Unlike the typical murder mystery, the narrative here is robust yet gently brought out and has certain lightness to it. The final darkness of a brutal murder is not felt in a block of black but in its greys and gets buried under the subtler, grander circumstances that come into play where somewhere one finds the circumstances of the characters lives justifying the means and the final actions. In the end it seems like a play of life and circumstances which force and bring about the final tragedy with the people as pawns of a grander plan by destiny itself.
There is a sense to all the drama and chaos as the successive meetings and partings happen within the visual narrative of the novel that one is constantly catching up to. One can feel the inner drama and thoughts of the characters in a startlingly clear manner and this lends itself to a premonition that something is not right even though all seems to be on the verge of coming back together with one happy band of friends coming together and making merry till sundown. As the novel progresses towards its final act the progression of time and events fastens, a classic tool, which Podder uses with dexterity and one waits with baited breath though one is not totally aware of when will the deed happen and who exactly would have done it.
Podder just about manages to get the reader engrossed in peeling the layers of the characters and looking back in memory constantly, while mapping the change of events as they run through the novel, as active participants rather than a passive disassociated observer, which is a feat in itself to be applauded. Tanushree’s style of writing is to be credited for her understanding of the land, its people, cultural subtleties and the many humourous and interesting idiosyncrasies it brings with it that she exploits to the fullest. Her writing is gentle and fluid, and reveals events by changing pace when required yet is not obscure or verbose.
If one wants to really experience a classic murder mystery which is not so much a gory splash on the wall as it is the warp and weave of lives of people in all their vagaries and dynamism and the fascinating circumstances that delivers the final plot ending in a masterstroke with great flourish, you don’t want to miss picking up this one!
Cafe Dissensus
Book Review: Tanushree Podder’s ‘A Closetful of Skeletons’February 28, 2018
By Rimli Bhattacharya
Title: A Closetful of Skeletons
Author: Tanushree Podder
Publisher: Harper Black, 2017.
Those who are interested in suspense and detective novels and are also ardent readers of such novels would love Tanushree Podder’s A Closetful of Skeletons, which offers a chilling mystery for you to solve.
The story revolves around Ramola – a stunning forty-year-old actress, who suddenly withdraws from public life at the peak of her glory in the Bollywood film industry. She becomes a recluse and starts to live in a picturesque hilly town called Ramsar. Among her neighbors are retired couples, including a colonel, a judge, a doctor and also a professor. Ramola lives in Charmwood Cottage for which she has actually paid a large sum from her savings, when she decided to retire and turn ascetic. Her only companions are her gardener, a cook, and a domestic-help. She leads an idyllic life without incident, when she decides to write her autobiography. During her strolls around the neighbourhood, she bumps into Tia, who has also arrived in Ramsar to cope with heartbreak and is in need of a sabbatical. Ramola and Tia share a common bond of desolation and soon become confidantes to each other. Since Tia wants to write a novel and Ramola her memoir, the two of them decide to collaborate on Ramola’s memoir.
The twist in this gripping novel comes, when Ramola decides to invite several men from her life for her birthday party and make a strange announcement. Some of the men are well-known and some are small-time casual lovers. They include a top notch film director, a politician, a fading actor, an underworld don, and a Casanova. She invites them personally to her birthday party with the promise of an important announcement. The director, politician, and the don, though initially reluctant, cannot get over Ramola, whom they had loved once upon a time. They are equally curious to know about the announcement and arrive at Ramsar to attend her birthday bash. The actor and the gigolo sound more than happy and immediately agree to meet Ramola with hopes to catch up with her again as well as thinking if there might be a chance to regain their own stardom with her influence.
On the night of her birthday party, she announces that she will soon publish her tell-all memoir. On hearing this, each of those men tries to dissuade her and Ramola is dragged back into the deception and chicanery she thought she had left behind. Mita Ghosh, reviewing this novel for The Hindu, writes that Ramola has a “nasty surprise in store for these men, some of whom had been instrumental in her celluloid success, but had also exploited her cruelly: at the party, she announces her plans of publishing her memoir, a no-holds-barred exposé featuring them. Hackles are raised, fear is generated and murder is inevitable.” Ultimately, Ramola is murdered and after a few days the lifeless body of Tia is also discovered.
For the next few days, the police as well as Colonel Arjun H Acharya, who is helping the police, are on their toes, trying to solve the two murders.
Ramola’s life has not been squeaky clean and the novel highlights this from the first chapter on. The novel also projects the lives of several actresses and other women. Women are often objects of lust to men, to be used and thrown away, and this novel is bound to touch a raw nerve in any woman, who has had a similar past. For the men who have flirted with and bedded several women but have never loved, this novel will be a surprise to them as well.
The author, Tanushree Podder, revealed, in an earlier interview, that she had this idea for Ramola’s character after reading a newspaper report. Podder said that writing a novel in any genre can be a challenging process. She believes that detective fiction offers a real challenge because one has to make sure that the crime is believable and the readers don’t discover the murderer too early in the book. On why she had chosen a character like Ramola who had some grey areas open to the interpretation of readers, she said in the interview “All human beings have grey areas. No one is totally white or black. Ramola is a Bollywood star, who worked her way up to the top of the ladder through various machinations. With no sugar daddies.”
A Closetful of Skeletons does not root for the central character. The reader’s empathy is born out of identification with Ramola’s internal struggles. In her tweet chat with the portal, Women’s Web, Podder revealed that she created Ramola’s character with the belief that readers become invested in a story only if they can identify with a character. Ramola is a woman whom people would love to hate, while empathizing with her. Inspired by female characters like Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, this novel is a perfect read. Just like Ramola’s neighbor, the retired army officer Arjun H. Acharya, the reader might also try to solve the crime as they read it.
The book is unputdownable. As a reader, I kept turning the pages to know who killed the movie star. The plot is sharp and the storytelling is racy. I was hooked until the very end. The novel is the author’s first tryst with crime fiction and she deserves a big thumbs up for it.
A Closetful of Skeletons is available on Amazon India and Flipkart. Do watch the trailer of the gripping novel here.
13 January, 2018
Five men are on their way to a hill station, where Ramola, a fading movie star, waits to make an announcement that will change their lives forever — reads the jacket of A Closetful of Skeletons. Uhuh. Is it something like Sunset Boulevard (film), we thought.
The similarities are there — the protagonist is a fading star, and the book serves some delicious gossip, the insecurities and cut-throat competition that prevails in the film world. But Ramola, unlike Norma (the ageing star in Sunset Boulevard) doesn’t live under any illusion that she is going to make a grand come-back. She is happy with the world she has created in Ramsar, a hill-station in up north, pursuing other interests, living a secluded, but not a lonely life.
But her past does have a presence in her present. Ramola has written her autobiography — ‘exposé’ being the right term. And, she has invited five men, from her past, to celebrate her new project. However, the men get jittery when they hear about the book. They have got everything to lose if their exploits become public knowledge. No wonder then that two days after the announcement of the book, Ramola is found murdered.
This opens up the trail of whos, whys and hows with ASP Tim Thapa and Colonel Acharya trying to outwit the killer/s. In the process, they figure out the enigmatic persona of Ramola, who is described variously by her detractors as ‘hard as nails’, ‘cold’, ‘calculating’ and ‘selfish’.
For a thriller mystery to click with the readers, it has to be fast-paced and a page turner. A Closetful of Skeletons is a page-turner, but the pace lags a bit when the author tries to set up a scene too lavishly. And, yet when the climax comes, the reader is in for a surprise. All our guesswork results in a naught. The credit is due to the author, whose first attempt at writing a thriller, gets a thumbs up.
The Pioneer
A Closetful of Mystery
Sunday, 08 April 2018 | AMRITA VARMA | in Agenda
This balanced murder mystery keeps the rational wheels in the reader’s head churning without overly violent or graphic description, says AMRITA VARMA
A good murder mystery, on a cold winter night, with a cup of warm coffee and your mind buzzing with visions and images of stories untold, is pure bliss, if one has experienced it. This particular one does justice to that experience without being aggressively graphic and violent in its expression. The novel itself travels from the fast — paced cinematic visions of the lives of the who’s who of Bollywood with all its masala, moving to life in a cottage of an idyllic village in the Himalayas with its laid back peaceful surroundings. The protagonist, Ramola, who is an immensely successful actress, carries the story through her relative struggle in the film industry from her liaisons with men and brushes with the casting couch, to her shift to limelight and then to a life of relative recluse which she has enjoyed immensely in the recent past.
One gets a fantastic experience of the beauty and serenity of life in the hills and its slow pace where leisurely pursuits are the order of the day. Coming back to Mumbai, the characters are presented in the first few chapters one after another. The psychological make up, frustrations, tensions, emotional associations and their expectations with the protagonist can be sensed which are further re instated through the novel. Meanwhile, in the hamlet of Ramsar, Ramola has been writing an autobiography with the help of a young journalist who resides with her. They plan a launch of sorts by inviting each of the characters that have been an integral part of her story to her 40th birthday party in the hills. To add to it is an audience of the local judge, retired army officer, doctor, policeman/ detective and their families who are the local neighbours and the servants in all their ji hazoori, hard work, alcoholic abandon and careless gossip. The stage is set for murder. Let the games begin.
What is interesting is the relative ease with which Podder flows from one character to another and binds the mystery where not only can one experience what each entity is going through internally, but also its external manifestations in their behavior while keeping the secret of the possible murderer/s under strict lock and key. One seems to go through a parallel detective game along with the colonel and the detective/ policeman who play the part of the Sherlock — Watson duo in its classic style with aplomb. As it happens in the hills, one finds beautiful depictions of everyday life, the walks through the hills, those lovely, homely cottages with flowering creepers on walls and the surrounding cottages with their inhabitants sitting in their gardens basking in the sun and the views and idle talk which exists in places where there is less to do and more time to kill. The entire novel is peppered with such visuals and it is commendable how Podder has built the story gradually weaving it with these detailed panoramic depictions so much so that the reader actually feels transported there and one can feel the crisp mountain air and the chirping of the birds!
While the novel runs in a racy manner like a Doyle novel with intrigue around every bend, the familiar idyllic countryside plays well with the contradictions between time and space. There is too much excitement for a hill town, which in a humourous way, gives something to the local people living there to do and think about while all the city dwellers who have thronged the hills for their various vested reasons enjoy the bounties of nature and rest, ironically around the stage where the murder is set! In doing so, the characters though very realistic, gain strains of a comic identity through their respective circumstances and actions. Unlike the typical murder mystery, the narrative here is robust yet gently brought out and has certain lightness to it. The final darkness of a brutal murder is not felt in a block of black but in its greys and gets buried under the subtler, grander circumstances that come into play where somewhere one finds the circumstances of the characters lives justifying the means and the final actions. In the end it seems like a play of life and circumstances which force and bring about the final tragedy with the people as pawns of a grander plan by destiny itself.
There is a sense to all the drama and chaos as the successive meetings and partings happen within the visual narrative of the novel that one is constantly catching up to. One can feel the inner drama and thoughts of the characters in a startlingly clear manner and this lends itself to a premonition that something is not right even though all seems to be on the verge of coming back together with one happy band of friends coming together and making merry till sundown. As the novel progresses towards its final act the progression of time and events fastens, a classic tool, which Podder uses with dexterity and one waits with baited breath though one is not totally aware of when will the deed happen and who exactly would have done it.
Podder just about manages to get the reader engrossed in peeling the layers of the characters and looking back in memory constantly, while mapping the change of events as they run through the novel, as active participants rather than a passive disassociated observer, which is a feat in itself to be applauded. Tanushree’s style of writing is to be credited for her understanding of the land, its people, cultural subtleties and the many humourous and interesting idiosyncrasies it brings with it that she exploits to the fullest. Her writing is gentle and fluid, and reveals events by changing pace when required yet is not obscure or verbose.
If one wants to really experience a classic murder mystery which is not so much a gory splash on the wall as it is the warp and weave of lives of people in all their vagaries and dynamism and the fascinating circumstances that delivers the final plot ending in a masterstroke with great flourish, you don’t want to miss picking up this one!
Cafe Dissensus
Book Review: Tanushree Podder’s ‘A Closetful of Skeletons’February 28, 2018
By Rimli Bhattacharya
Title: A Closetful of Skeletons
Author: Tanushree Podder
Publisher: Harper Black, 2017.
Those who are interested in suspense and detective novels and are also ardent readers of such novels would love Tanushree Podder’s A Closetful of Skeletons, which offers a chilling mystery for you to solve.
The story revolves around Ramola – a stunning forty-year-old actress, who suddenly withdraws from public life at the peak of her glory in the Bollywood film industry. She becomes a recluse and starts to live in a picturesque hilly town called Ramsar. Among her neighbors are retired couples, including a colonel, a judge, a doctor and also a professor. Ramola lives in Charmwood Cottage for which she has actually paid a large sum from her savings, when she decided to retire and turn ascetic. Her only companions are her gardener, a cook, and a domestic-help. She leads an idyllic life without incident, when she decides to write her autobiography. During her strolls around the neighbourhood, she bumps into Tia, who has also arrived in Ramsar to cope with heartbreak and is in need of a sabbatical. Ramola and Tia share a common bond of desolation and soon become confidantes to each other. Since Tia wants to write a novel and Ramola her memoir, the two of them decide to collaborate on Ramola’s memoir.
The twist in this gripping novel comes, when Ramola decides to invite several men from her life for her birthday party and make a strange announcement. Some of the men are well-known and some are small-time casual lovers. They include a top notch film director, a politician, a fading actor, an underworld don, and a Casanova. She invites them personally to her birthday party with the promise of an important announcement. The director, politician, and the don, though initially reluctant, cannot get over Ramola, whom they had loved once upon a time. They are equally curious to know about the announcement and arrive at Ramsar to attend her birthday bash. The actor and the gigolo sound more than happy and immediately agree to meet Ramola with hopes to catch up with her again as well as thinking if there might be a chance to regain their own stardom with her influence.
On the night of her birthday party, she announces that she will soon publish her tell-all memoir. On hearing this, each of those men tries to dissuade her and Ramola is dragged back into the deception and chicanery she thought she had left behind. Mita Ghosh, reviewing this novel for The Hindu, writes that Ramola has a “nasty surprise in store for these men, some of whom had been instrumental in her celluloid success, but had also exploited her cruelly: at the party, she announces her plans of publishing her memoir, a no-holds-barred exposé featuring them. Hackles are raised, fear is generated and murder is inevitable.” Ultimately, Ramola is murdered and after a few days the lifeless body of Tia is also discovered.
For the next few days, the police as well as Colonel Arjun H Acharya, who is helping the police, are on their toes, trying to solve the two murders.
Ramola’s life has not been squeaky clean and the novel highlights this from the first chapter on. The novel also projects the lives of several actresses and other women. Women are often objects of lust to men, to be used and thrown away, and this novel is bound to touch a raw nerve in any woman, who has had a similar past. For the men who have flirted with and bedded several women but have never loved, this novel will be a surprise to them as well.
The author, Tanushree Podder, revealed, in an earlier interview, that she had this idea for Ramola’s character after reading a newspaper report. Podder said that writing a novel in any genre can be a challenging process. She believes that detective fiction offers a real challenge because one has to make sure that the crime is believable and the readers don’t discover the murderer too early in the book. On why she had chosen a character like Ramola who had some grey areas open to the interpretation of readers, she said in the interview “All human beings have grey areas. No one is totally white or black. Ramola is a Bollywood star, who worked her way up to the top of the ladder through various machinations. With no sugar daddies.”
A Closetful of Skeletons does not root for the central character. The reader’s empathy is born out of identification with Ramola’s internal struggles. In her tweet chat with the portal, Women’s Web, Podder revealed that she created Ramola’s character with the belief that readers become invested in a story only if they can identify with a character. Ramola is a woman whom people would love to hate, while empathizing with her. Inspired by female characters like Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, this novel is a perfect read. Just like Ramola’s neighbor, the retired army officer Arjun H. Acharya, the reader might also try to solve the crime as they read it.
The book is unputdownable. As a reader, I kept turning the pages to know who killed the movie star. The plot is sharp and the storytelling is racy. I was hooked until the very end. The novel is the author’s first tryst with crime fiction and she deserves a big thumbs up for it.
A Closetful of Skeletons is available on Amazon India and Flipkart. Do watch the trailer of the gripping novel here.
