THE STORY OF MY ASSASSINS, by Tarun J. Tejpal. Melville House, 2012, 544 pp., $27.95 (hardcover)

Tarun J. Tejpal's "The Story of My Assassins" begins, "The morning I heard I'd been shot I was sitting in my office. ..."

Even as we are pulled in by the undeniable catchiness of this opening, even as we enjoy the first few pages of the novel, we weigh the 500-plus pages ahead of us and worry. The reason we worry is that we recognize the narrator: a cynical and acerbic observer of modern society — in this case, modern Indian society — who we'll accompany on a quest to learn the story of his assassins, enjoying as we go his cynical riffs on all that he encounters.

As Raymond Chandler and others have shown us, this sort of thing can be a great deal of fun: Who doesn't enjoy spending a couple of hundred pages in the company of a bitter, alienated — and witty — fellow? The problem is, all that bitter alienated wit can, when stretched over three-, four-, or five-hundred pages, get old.