a man hanging from the ceiling fan.
A suicide note cum murder confession.
And a name . . . Shaunak Sodhi.
When the case comes their way, Senior Inspector Saralkar has just been diagnosed with hypertension and PSI Motkar is busy with rehearsals of an amateur play.
What appears at first to be a commonplace crime by a debt-ridden, cuckolded husband, who has killed his unfaithful wife and then hung himself, soon begins to unfold as a baffling mystery. As clues point to a seven-year-old unsolved murder in Bangalore and other leads emerge closer home, Saralkar and Motkar find themselves investigating shady secrets, bitter grudges, fishy land deals, carnal desires, the dead woman Anushka Doshi’s sinister obsession with past life regression and her husband’s links to a suspicious, small-time god-man, Rangdev Baba.And then, suddenly, the murderer resurfaces and yet another life is in grave danger . . .
Can Saralkar and Motkar get to the bottom of an unimaginably shocking motive and stop the malevolent killer from committing the fourth murder . . .?

Salil Desai is an author, columnist and film-maker. Three and a Half Murders is his fifth book and the third one in the Inspector Saralkar Mystery Series. He has written three more crime novels—Killing Ashish Karve (2014), The Murder of Sonia Raikkonen (2015) and Murder on a Side Street (2011) as well as a collection of short stories, Lost Libido and Other Gulp Fiction (2012). An alumnus of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), his dramatized management training videos are much appreciated in the corporate world. Salil also conducts workshops in creative writing and film-making. As a columnist, over 400 articles, op-ed pieces, features and travelogues written by him have appeared in The Times of India, Indian Express, DNA, The Tribune, Reader’s Digest, Deccan Herald, The Hindu, etc. He was also one of the four international authors selected worldwide for the HALD International Writers’ Residency in Denmark, hosted by the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators in June 2016. Salil lives with his wife and two sons in Pune.