Jessica shuts the book she has been reading as she hears a loud knock on her door. The cover of the book has an image of an officer resembling Inspector Alex sitting kneeled in front of a dead corpse and the title "Happy New Year !".
Jessica is a struggling 26-year-old female who is trying to make it big as a private detective. She suffers from insomnia and kills her nights by reading through crime novels and often getting lost in the world of the story.
"Happy New Year!" is one such novel she is reading right now, written by her own father, Alex Howlett.
She often replaces the characters in the novel with people known to her, and the hero is usually her father.
Jessica runs a private detective agency in an old shopping complex in the locality with her two partners, James (in his 60s) and Tom (20). Jessica's passion for crime solving came from her father, Alex, a small-town crime novelist of the 1980s. Alex wrote a series of pulpy crime novels with the lead character of most of his stories being a police investigating officer named "Inspector Alex".
Usually, before his next novel, Alex first selects a crime that happened in the recent past, then conducts his own investigation, taking interviews from the people involved in the crime, like the victim's family, the investigating officer, etc.
He then writes a fictionalised version of the real incident, adding some flavours to it.
However, unlike the hero in his novels, Alex never succeeded, both as a writer and a person. None of his novels were considered to reach the standards set by the elite literary world at that time, and hence, they could not attract any good publishers. The failed novelist had his own financial constraints and frequent frictions with his wife.
Alex's life took another mysterious turn when one day he went out for research purposes for his next novel but never returned home. Jessica, who was only 5 years old at that time and was shattered by it.
A missing case was filed. The family pursued the case for several years but could not get any information about him.
Slowly, everybody in the family concluded that Alex was no more... everybody except Jessica.
The greatest mystery of Jessica's personal as well as detective life was that of the "Missing case of Alex Howlett".
She still has her father's photograph on the missing persons notice board in her office.
She has been investigating his disappearance side by side with her own work, collecting every bit of memory and information she could gather about her father.
His novels were a way for her to know more about him. She read every novel written by him back and forth, discovering some new ones, some even unpublished manuscripts every time she visited her hometown.
Jessica is currently staying at a private women's hostel in town, where she is reading a novel called "Happy New Year !", which was the last novel written by her father. Her reading gets interrupted by the loud knocking on the door. When she opens the door, she is met by the hostel warden, who is disgusted by the sight of the plight of her room. The warden has brought her along with her a new roommate for Jessica named Lucy, who is relatively younger and naive and recently joined for a degree at a popular college in the town. Jessica was not pleased with the arrival of a new roommate, and Lucy, who later learnt that Jessica is a private detective and that none of her previous roommates had lasted more than a month.