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Summary
Summary
All Bombay is buzzing with news of the murder of Anil Ajmani. It is certainly a baffling case, for the millionaire was found stabbed to death in his heavily guarded and tightly secured mansion. Every inspector in the Crime Branch hopes to be the one to nail the killer and that includes Inspector Ganesh Ghote. Unfortunately, he is not assigned to the case. Instead, he has been given the less glorious task of tracking down a cat burglar, nicknamed Yeshwant, who has been scaling apartment buildings in the dead of night to steal valuable pieces of jewelry. Aided-or perhaps hampered-by his old friend Axel Svensson, seeking Indian warmth from his troubles in winter-cold Sweden, Ghote fights to uncover Yeshwant's true identity. And in so doing, unexpectedly finds that he may be the one to solve the murder of Anil Ajmani after all.
Author Notes
H. R. F. Keating (Henry Reymond Fitzwalter "Harry" Keating) was born in St. Leonards-on-Sea on October 31, 1926. He attended Merchant Taylor's School in London, England and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. He worked for The Times (London) as the crime books reviewer from 1967 to 1983. His first novel, Death and the Visiting Firemen, was published in 1959. He wrote about 50 fiction and nonfiction works during his lifetime, but is best known for the Inspector Ghote series. His other works include the Harriet Martens Mysteries series and Sherlock Holmes: The Man and His World.
Keating received the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1964 for The Perfect Murder and in 1980 for The Murder of the Maharajah, the Edgar Alan Poe award in 1988, the George N. Dove Award in 1995, and the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding service to crime fiction in 1996. He died of cardiac failure on March 27, 2011 at the age of 84.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Breaking and Entering: An Inspector Ghote Mystery, the prolific H.R.F. Keating (Doing Wrong) puts another notch in the belt of his popular hero, Bombay Inspector Ganesh Ghote. When Ghote is assigned to a series of jewelry thefts instead of a high-profile murder, his investigation might lead him to the murderer. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
While the favored officers in Bombay's Detection of Crime Branch investigate the high-profile murder of air-conditioning magnate Anil Ajmani, killed inside his closely guarded compound by someone who managed to circumvent all his elaborate security measures, Inspector Ganesh Ghote (Bribery, Corruption Also, 1999, etc.) has been shunted aside to the relatively minor case of the cat burglar who feisty old columnist Pinky Dinkarrao has dubbed Yeshwant. Even though the thief's m.o. is distinctive-he climbs the walls of buildings, slips through open windows, and escapes each time with a single valuable piece of jewelry his victim has providentially neglected to lock in her safe-he's so careful not to leave clues that Ghote, hobbled by the presence of Axel Svensson, the retired Swedish official who helped mangle Ghote's very first case (The Perfect Murder, 1963), despairs of ever catching him. But Ghote's patient questioning of the robbery victims-a round of endlessly polite interrogations that gives Keating an opportunity for still another incisive tour of contemporary Indian mores-eventually uncovers a pattern that not only identifies Yeshwant but tempts Ghote into a trade: letting the thief off the legal hook in turn for evidence that just might give Ghote a decisive advantage over the rival inspector who's been placed in charge of the coveted Ajmani murder. The usual indifferent mystery-mongering is spiced by a gallery of sharply observed social types, Keating's usual eye for the nuances of protocol, and a delicately comic sentence-by-sentence verbal texture that's almost vanished from the modern detective story.
Booklist Review
Inspector Ganesh Ghote of the Mumbai (he bristles at the British "Bombay") Police is a man beset--by domestic problems, with an adult son and his contentious wife fighting over the TV in his overcrowded flat; by professional problems, with his reassignment from a high-profile murder case to that of a cat burglar; and by the sudden reintroduction in his life of Axel Svensson (see The Perfect Murder, 1997), a huge, overwhelming Swede who insists on tagging along with him. Ghote always seeks peace. None of this helps. But it does help create a wonderfully comic intersection of the personal and the professional. Ghote is almost Rumpole transported to India, harried at home and office but revived by crime. Ghote's meticulous footwork yields surprising connections to other cases, including the one from which he was pulled. Keating provides rich Indian cultural detail and layered characters in a fully satisfying case. --Connie Fletcher
