Six Suspects

by Vikas Swarup
Hennepin County Library audiobook 14 CDs
read by Lyndham Gregory
genre: realistic fiction

I only got through one and a half discs . . . it was taking too long for the story to come together. I think I was on suspect number three or four . . . and I didn't really care who killed Vicky Rai. He was a jerk who deserved it. I got this because I LOVE the story of Q&A (aka Slumdog Millionaire, which I NEVER want to see). But I just couldn't get into this one; each new suspect had a new story and my brain was having trouble keeping it all straight. Gregory's vocal work is wonderful, but this story didn't catch me.

"Seven years ago, Vivek Rai murdered Ruby Gill in a restaurant in New Delhi because she refused to serve him a drink. Now Vicky Rai (pronounced "Rye") is dead, killed at a party he had thrown to celebrate his acquittal. Six of the guests are discovered with guns in their possession and are taken in for questioning. Who are these six, and what were they doing that night? In this elaborate mystery we join Arun Advani, investigative journalist, as the lives of the six unravel: a corrupt bureaucrat, an American tourist infatuated with an Indian actress, a stone-age tribesman on a quest to discover a sacred stone, a Bollywood sex symbol with a guilty secret, a mobile phone thief who dreams big, and an ambitious politician prepared to stoop low. Each is equally likely to have pulled the trigger." (from the back of the case)