Description

At 7:42 a.m. on a misty Tuesday in October, the heritage Nilgiri Mountain Railway begins its slow climb from Mettupalayam toward Coonoor. Coach A: thirty-eight passengers. Among them, in window seat 14, sits Ms. Aaratrika Nag — a thirty-six-year-old corporate lawyer from Bombay, on a planned ten-day solo holiday in the hills.

By the time the train reaches Coonoor at 12:11 p.m., Aaratrika Nag is no longer on it. Her bag is. Her phone is. Her half-finished coffee is still on the wooden tray. Coach A is sealed. Thirty-seven passengers remain. CCTV confirms that nobody disembarked between stations. Coach A has a single toilet and three windows, all sealed. The doors were locked from the inside for the entire journey.

Inspector Vimala Ramaswamy of the Coonoor Police — a careful, sceptical, soon-to-retire investigator who has spent her entire career in these hills — opens the file at 1:00 p.m. and realises, by 4:00 p.m., that the disappearance of Ms. Nag is the visible tip of something far older, far darker and stretching back to a Coonoor tea-estate scandal she had been ordered, in 1998, to leave alone.

Tightly plotted, brilliantly atmospheric and impossible to predict, *Last Train to Coonoor* is a locked-room thriller in the great Indian tradition — set against the mist, tea and quiet menace of the Nilgiris.

For readers of *Janice Hallett* and *Anthony Horowitz*. The Indian thriller of the season.