The Man Who Borrowed Saturday: A London Mystery

A stranger wants three hundred pounds. The photograph is Bimal's. The name is not. Recently made redundant and already planning a visit home, Bimal Sen is trying to finish a samosa at Liverpool Street when two argumentative old friends mistake him for a man who owes them money. Their explanation involves a missing bookkeeper, a five-hundred-pound debt that never quite settles, and a café where one chair is always left empty. Then a man in a yellow coat returns from nowhere, leaves an impossible invitation, and disappears through an ordinary door. With sharp-minded paper conservator Nell Ward, Bimal follows the trail through rain-wet East London to a restored dining train that cannot move. Behind the warm lamps and carefully arranged memories, someone is borrowing more than names. When a missing friend is found dead, old receipts, edited voices and an invented Saturday become matters of life and death. But solving the crime will mean admitting the things Bimal and Nell would rather leave out of their own accounts. And falling in love may require something harder than suspicion: the willingness to tell the truth without making the other person pay for it. The Man Who Borrowed Saturday is a complete, illustrated London mystery combining mounting suspense, dry humour, found-family loyalties and an adult romance. Its central mysteries are resolved within this book. By Anabil Sengupta.