400 Days

Mystery and thriller

Print length: 352 pagesWestland, 2021

Description

Keshav, an aspiring Indian Police Service officer living in the Icon gated community, is approached by a neighbor whose twelve-year-old daughter disappeared nine months earlier. Attracted by both detective work and a substantial reward, he revives the cold case with Saurabh, his hacker friend. The girl's troubled home life, her younger sister's strange description of an abductor, and online exchanges with someone called Roy complicate every promising lead. Meanwhile, Keshav's growing feelings for the missing girl's married mother blur the boundary between investigation and personal involvement. Blending mystery with romance, the novel follows two amateur sleuths through digital evidence and guarded family relationships as they try to discover what happened before hope disappears entirely.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Dialogue-driven · Direct

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Dark · Suspenseful · Tense

Structure

Linear

Focus

Mystery · Plot · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 2 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

FamilyKnowledge and truthLoveTrauma

About Chetan Bhagat

Chetan Bhagat is an Indian novelist, columnist, and screenwriter whose fiction follows ambitious young people through the institutions and social divisions shaping contemporary India. His plots move briskly, relying on direct, conversational prose and frequent dialogue to turn courtship, friendship, and career choices into practical negotiations over class, language, religion, family, and education. In 2 States, a self-deprecating first-person narrator describes a couple trying to win over Punjabi and Tamil families, making marriage a sequence of comic setbacks and strategic compromises. The 3 Mistakes of My Life broadens a friendship story through cricket, commerce, an earthquake, and communal violence in Ahmedabad. Half Girlfriend similarly carries a romance across Delhi, Bihar, and New York, while its hero’s unease with English connects intimacy to unequal access and social confidence. Bhagat builds these novels from recognizable settings, clear conflicts, and scene-led exchanges. Several have been adapted for film, and he has also worked directly on screenplays.