If binging on Savdhaan India and Crime Patrol have been your favourite past times, the Queens of Crime is your cup of tea.
Written by Savdhaan India’s captivating host and actor Sushant Singh, and Best Fiction Writer Award winner Kulpreet Yadav, Queens of Crime is a collection of ten short stories that retell the bone-chilling journies of some of the most notorious female criminals of our country. Or at least that is what it sets out to do.
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The book is a monotonous narration of the events where each story follows the same structure. The same sentences are used over and over to explain similar plot lines. Most dialogues between the characters are in Hindi, which makes no sense since the rest of the story is written in English. While some of the stories follow well-known criminals like Cyanide Mallika, Shantidevi Patkar, and Sanjana Bai Govil, it is hard to trace the others. Be it the story of Madhu Goyal, an incriminated diplomat accused of sharing non-essential information with ISI, or Leena Aulakh, a struggling actress who turned into a honeytrap for her serial killer boyfriend, there is little to no information about them on the internet.
Yet, the book somehow manages to captivate its readers right from the very first page.
The simple writing and the use of everyday phrases make it easy to get through the book without losing sight of the story. The storytelling is very similar to the narrations of popular crime shows Savdhaan India and Crime Patrol (minus the visuals).
Queens of Crimes tells the stories of these hardened women criminals with such subtlety that at some point your heart cries out for the injustice that lead to their transformations. Some of these women come from dysfunctional families, homelessness, and hunger, or are victims of abusive partners, others were simply born with a broken moral compass.
Irrespective of the presentation, the book is a good choice to break a reading slump. It is light weighted storytelling of horrific events and a great companion for your evening tea if you love espionage novels or true crime.
