4 ideas
Lalli, a retired Bombay policewoman, attends a society dinner party whose guests belong to the city's celebrity 'Page 3' social circuit. The case is a closed-circle murder transplanted into a contemporary Indian home.
Confining a crime to a fixed group of people in one household turns the investigation into elimination rather than open search. Every guest had access and opportunity. So the solution depends on motive and on small inconsistencies in what each person says and does, which the detective reads against the others.
In a world where status comes from being seen and written about, people curate their public selves all the time. That constant performance hides real resentments, debts and attachments. The detective's job is to read the gap between someone's social persona and their private behaviour, because motive lives in that gap.
An elderly retired policewoman is easy to dismiss as a harmless guest, so suspects speak and act more freely around her. Her professional training in precise, almost clinical observation then turns ordinary domestic details into evidence: food, servants, seating and small talk. Being underestimated plus trained attention gives her a view of the truth that a visible official investigator would not get.