Fawaz Jaleel’s latest political investigative thriller, Nobody Likes An Outsider is doing good business at online and offline centres. The book which made it to the offline market a couple of months after its successful run online was recently seen in the Top 10 best selling charts. But what is it that makes this book stand out among Indian thrillers, and puts it among the finest political thrillers from India?
Published by Kalamos Literary Services, Nobody Likes An Outsider opens with the death of India’s most promising politician, Ashraf Zain who gets killed in a road accident at the Barauni highway in Nepal. While the police investigative if the death is a murder of accident, Ashraf’s PA and close aide, Piyali Sharma is found dead in a hotel room in the city. The surmounting suspicions, coupled with the increasing political pressure and rising civil society movements force the government to hand over the case to the CBI. A young and inexperienced CBI team lead by Yohan Tytler is called in to investigate the case. Yohan, the senior inspector is ably assisted by his subordinates, Ila Qureshi and Sukumar Azhagu. As the team dig deeper into the case facts, evidences, and incidents surrounding it they unearth a mystery that shows that these murders are linked to the modern history of Bihar and India.
The book explores multiple facets of Indian politics and socio-demographic incidents. With its narrative travelling from the 1970s to 2021, most twists and turns have a connection to the contemporary history of India. The book uses political narratives as a powerful tool to comment on several issues in the country while not derailing from its purpose of serving itself as a delicious murder mystery that the reader attempts to solve along with the writer.
The book makes it a point to touch upon sensitive issues such as patriarchy, caste dynamics, religious politics and more through its commentary and ensures that occurrences of casual sexism that happen in popular Indian fiction is avoided. While the gender sensitivities are on point, the book should have built on some of its powerful women characters. A slight drawback of the book is the number of powerful male characters overpowering the few female powerful characters but one can attribute this to the overall narrative that forces the author to do so. Nobody Likes An Outsider also has a climax that is divided into two chapters and the unravelling of the mystery may go down in history as one of the fearless endings in Indian literature.
Born in Vilakkudy, Fawaz Jaleel is an Indian thriller author based out of Mumbai and Bangalore. In the past, he has worked as a consultant to the Government of India for a project managed by the Prime Minister of India’s office. The Indian author spent his schooling days in Bahrain where he passed out from The New Indian School. He is a notable alumni of Madras Christian College and Azim Premji University.