Justice For Some Review: What Ten Lost Years Can Teach

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4.3 out of 5)

I picked this one up expecting a courtroom drama. I finished it thinking about something else entirely. In my years reviewing books for Deified Publication, I have read a fair number of legal thrillers, and most of them follow a familiar shape. There is a crime, there is a trial, there is a satisfying verdict at the end that lets you close the book and move on with your evening. Justice For Some by Sandeep Sinha and Vimal Bhatia does not give you that shape. It gives you something closer to how the Indian legal system actually behaves, which is slower, messier, and far less interested in your emotional closure. I say this as someone who went in expecting a plot and came out thinking about a person.

That person is Prabhu Raj Naidu, and the book opens with the afternoon that changes his life. He is a young man in Ghaziabad who happens to be near a blast, and because he is running from the scene along with everyone else, he ends up arrested as a suspected terrorist. What struck me early on is how the authors do not dramatize this moment with sirens and courtroom shouting. Instead they describe it almost administratively, the way evidence moves faster than truth, the way a young man with no uniform and no explanation becomes convenient to the story the police need to tell. It is an unsettling opening precisely because it feels so ordinary.

What the Book Is About

At its core, this is the story of a man who spends ten years in custody for a crime he did not commit, and who then spends the rest of his life inside the very system that failed him, first as a lawyer, then as a judge, and eventually as a private investigator working alongside a small, loyal team. The blurb calls it an examination rather than an indictment, and having read the pages I was given, I think that description is accurate. The book is less interested in villains than it is in procedure, in how delay itself becomes a kind of punishment, and in how ordinary people learn to live inside a system that was never built with urgency in mind.

Naidu’s path from prisoner to judge is not told as a triumphant rise. There is a scene where his mother, Nandini Iyer, visits him in jail and tells him plainly that survival will require learning things the innocent are never supposed to need. I found that scene difficult to read in the best way, because it refuses to let the story be simple. She is not comforting him. She is preparing him for a version of himself he never wanted to become. That single conversation sets the emotional register for everything that follows.

What Stood Out to Me

The book’s structure surprised me. Rather than building toward one big trial, it moves through decades and multiple cases, some real legal precedents woven into the narrative, like the Meenakshi vs State custodial violence matter and the Shanthi Devi case involving hostile witnesses. As someone who has read enough legal fiction to know when an author is faking familiarity with the law, I can say these details feel researched rather than decorative. Naidu’s judgments are written with the kind of careful, almost reluctant precision you would expect from someone who has personally experienced what happens when procedure fails a person.

What I found most affecting, though, were the smaller domestic threads. There is a subplot involving Kallu, a vegetable seller in Naidu’s new neighborhood, and his sixteen year old nephew Sooraj, who carries an old transistor radio everywhere he goes and treats it with something close to reverence. Naidu’s dry observation that this arrangement will either improve his life significantly or destroy what little peace remains made me smile, honestly, because it is such a human way to describe letting someone new into your house after a lifetime of guarding yourself. The radio becomes a recurring presence through the later chapters, playing old Bollywood songs in the background of conversations about custodial deaths and forged post mortem reports, and that contrast between the mundane and the devastating is where the writing is at its strongest.

There is also a striking sequence involving a case file that has simply gone missing. Naidu closes the register after being told the papers are not in circulation, and the narration notes that this was not the first time he had seen negligence, but this time it read as something closer to a deliberate erosion of memory within the system itself. That scene, more than any courtroom moment, is what stayed with my thinking after I put the pages down, because it names something true about how records disappear not through dramatic conspiracy but through quiet administrative shrugging that nobody is ever held accountable for.

The later chapters bring in Debashish Mohanty and Arvind Mishra, who work alongside Naidu on cases involving custodial illegality, and Dr Ira Manchandani, a psychiatrist whose presence adds an unexpected emotional dimension to what could otherwise have been a very procedural back half. Their scene discussing Jagjivan Prasad, a man whose fifteen years of psychiatric custody had no legal basis whatsoever, is one of the more upsetting passages in the book, and it earns that reaction because the authors let the facts of the case speak rather than reaching for melodrama.

The Emotional Core

If you are looking for a book that resolves neatly, this may frustrate you, and I say that as a compliment rather than a warning. The emotional weight here comes from watching a man who was denied justice spend his entire adult life trying to make sure fewer people experience what he did, while slowly realizing that the machinery he now serves is capable of the same failures that nearly destroyed him. There is a moment near the later chapters where Naidu reflects that karma does not arrive with sirens, it waits, and when it returns it does not ask permission. I found that line staying in my head for longer than I expected, mostly because the book earns it rather than simply stating it as a slogan.

The political thread involving Mohar Singh Gujjar’s assassination and the maneuvering that follows adds a different kind of tension, one rooted in ambition and public perception rather than personal grief, and it broadens the book’s scope beyond a single man’s story into something closer to a portrait of how power actually moves in small town India.

Who This Book Is For

I would recommend this to readers who enjoy legal and procedural fiction with real weight behind it, particularly if you have any interest in how the Indian judicial system functions in practice rather than in theory. If you have read authors who write about institutional failure with patience rather than outrage, you will likely feel at home here. I would be less confident recommending it to readers who want fast pacing or a conventional mystery structure, because this book asks you to sit with process, with delay, and with the accumulation of small injustices rather than a single dramatic reveal.

Final Thoughts

Justice For Some is not a comfortable read, and I do not think it is trying to be. What it does well is refuse to simplify a system that resists simplification, and it does this through a protagonist whose personal history gives every procedural detail real emotional stakes. My only hesitation is that the sheer density of legal references and case citations occasionally slows the momentum, particularly in the middle chapters, and readers who prefer character driven pacing over documentary detail may find themselves wanting the story to move a little faster in places. That is a minor issue in an otherwise thoughtful and clearly researched book.

Is Justice For Some worth reading in 2026? I think so, especially given how often conversations about judicial delay and pending cases show up in the news right now. Sandeep Sinha and Vimal Bhatia have written something that feels less like fiction inspired by true cases and more like a record of how those cases actually unfold, one file, one delay, one small mercy at a time.