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** spoiler alert ** For someone who has just started reading Bengali detective books, this book was a goldmine for me. I've read Feluda and Kakababu books before it but those were for a somewhat younger audience. Byomkesh is the first adult detective book I've read in Bengali. What I liked about the Byomkesh books are, it covers a wide range of crimes. A lot of the crimes are driven by lust, but the writer has portrayed fraud, larceny, revenge, forgery, abduction and even contract killing very spontaneously.

Byomkesh's adventures begin in the 1930's. At first we see a young Byomkesh who meets Ajit. The stories are naraated by Ajit. In the first story Byomkesh arrives at Ajit's mess pretending to be a tenant looking for a room. He later reveals his landlord who happened to be the head of a drug cartel. Byomkesh and Ajit becomes friends and he invites Ajit to live at his house. Thus the duo of Byomkesh and Ajit were born who later solved some of the most mind boggling mysteries.

After solving some crimes and gaining popularity, Byomkesh meets Satyabati in one of the cases, who he goes on to marry afterwards. Sharadindu has portrayed some complexities between the husband and wife, which brings the stories closer to the society. He goes deep into the personal life of the sleuth, presenting the financial dilemmas being one. Byomkesh and Ajit later starts a printing press as a secondary income source. These events gives us a closer look at the detective's life and let us connect to him deeply.

The thing I liked most about Byomkesh is his values and principals. He justifies his actions according to his values than logic. In a period when the country was just beginning it's journey, Byomkesh didn't have a lot of faith in the law. On the contrary, in some of the stories he judges the criminals according to his own values and takes no action.

The crimes commited in the stories are versatile. Sharadindu has presented the plots uniquely. The criminals commited near perfect crimes which the police has no clues of. Without Byomkesh it would have been impossible to catch them. Though in most of the stories the villains would not give in and take their own lives in front of Byomkesh and the police. This might be common back then but seems very unlikely now. But the way the stories unfold and from the clues the sleuth reveals the crime is where Sharadindu has worked his magic to make Byomkesh one of the finest in Bengali literature.

From the stories, it seems very obvious that Byomkesh seems to shares his roots with Sherlock Holmes and Poirot. But I have a nightmare imagining Hercule and Sherlock in the streets of Kolkata. Byomkesh, and only Byomkesh is the sole answer for the crimes back then!