The Literary Mirror

Rao's thriller opens with a closed file and a constable, Bhola Rai, three years into retirement and still unable to let it stay closed. A schoolteacher vanished from a Gaya-bound bus in 1998; the case was filed as an accident within a week, on instructions Rai never questioned at the time.

The novel's pleasures are procedural rather than propulsive — Rai works through old bus registers, a retired conductor's memory, a widow who has remarried and does not want the past reopened. Rao resists the genre's usual twist-per-chapter pacing, which will frustrate readers expecting a thriller and reward those who stay.

The ending is smaller than the setup promises, and deliberately so. The Last Bus to Gaya is less interested in who is guilty than in who was allowed, at the time, not to ask.

“Rao's detective doesn't solve the case so much as outlive everyone who could stop him solving it.”