About C V Chauhan

I was born in a small town in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya and emigrated with my mother and six siblings to Leicester at the age of 11. My father had travelled to the UK three years before. Growing up in inner-city Leicester was hard and I was determined to break away from this cycle of deprivation by going to university. I graduated from the University of York and taught history in secondary schools in London and Birmingham, and latterly worked at a senior level in state education. From a young age I wanted to write but something always came in the way. But I recently decided to give up full-time work to focus on my ambition.

My debut thriller, The Dance of Death, published by Sapere Books in August 2022, is set in the heart of Leicester and is the first in a series. The central character, Rohan Sharma, is a relatively new and inexperienced homicide detective of South Asian origin. An able, widely-read individual in his mid-thirties, he straddles different cultures and backgrounds. He likes classical Western music, including Italian opera, but also enjoys listening to popular music and Bollywood songs. He likes white wine and eating good food. In his first case, he is charged with finding a psychopathic, schizophrenic killer whose ethnicity is not initially apparent, leading to all sorts of complications regarding the politics of race and identity.

The second book, Shattered Dreams, was published in March 2023 and deals with the underbelly of organised crime, corruption, sex work and human trafficking in Leicester. While DI Sharma grapples with solving the deaths of a number of people, he is haunted by the belief that his long-lost sister, who was kidnapped as a toddler in Kenya, is in the city searching for him. There is evidence that she’s trying to make contact but is the woman who she says she is? The book ends in a breath-taking climax on the roof of the tallest skyscraper in the city.

I have just completed the third thriller in the series, titled The Right Time to Die. The story starts with the very public shooting of a Bollywood star who has been invited to switch on the annual Diwali lights along The Golden Mile in Leicester, with more than thirty thousand people in attendance. The action quickly focuses on the tensions between the different ethnic groups within the city and the resultant deaths of a number of people, all seemingly unrelated. DI Sharma is quickly engulfed in a social and political maelstrom, covering international politics and the need to work with other agencies, including the counter-terrorism unit and the secret services. Nothing is as it seems. As with all of my books, the action is fast paced, with many twists and turns, and it ends in a nail-biting climax, where DI Sharma and his sergeant, Angie Deacon, race against time to stop a catastrophe engulfing the city. Will they succeed and, if so, at what cost? Look out for The Right Time to Die when it is published on 12th July 2024.