It is the twentieth novel in the Inspector Ghote series and the twenty-second book, due to the publication of two short story collections.

[1] Inspector Ghote is ordered to investigate a case of drug smuggling at the Mira Behn Institute for Medical Research.

Professor Phaterpaker also contemplates professional ruin as a result of Ram Mahipal's question, the answer to which Chagoo already knows.

The main body of the novel begins with the heading: Answer The Commissioner tells Ghote that a criminal named Abdul Khan has supplied Bombay film stars with drugs from the Mira Behn Institute.

Ghote is ordered to find who stole drugs from the institute and arrest them under a false charge to prevent a scandal.

Ghote tells the Commissioner that he recently caught an airline stewardess, Nicky D'Costa, smuggling drugs for Abdul Khan.

The next day the Commissioner assigns Ghote to investigate Chagoo's death to prevent the scandal being exposed by another officer.

Ghote interviews Dr Ram Mahipal, who left a reptile-room key in his old office at the institute when he suddenly quit his job.

Ghote learns from the building manager that Mahipal returned in order to access his computer files on the night Chagoo died.

Phaterpaker takes the news that Chagoo was murdered calmly, remarking that Mahipal was slipshod and implying that he was dismissed for this.

Mahipal denies this and reveals that he left the institute because Phaterpaker was removing lab animals that gave undesirable results.

At the police station, Ghote is dismayed when the inspector he is working with points out one of the three scientists must surely hang for the crime and expresses a preference that it be Dr Subbiah.

Ghote considers the reptile room and realises wooden stool must have been used to break the glass, so he decides to have it dusted for fingerprints.

At the police station Ghote learns that Nicky D'Costa has murdered, her throat slit after asking too many questions of Abdul Khan.

Ghote realises that he only saw the body laying face down, and the inspector originally assigned to the case never forwarded the medical examiner's report.

Returning to the police station, Ghote talks to the forensic expert who examined the stool from the institute reptile room.

The expert admits he only compared the fingerprints on the stool to the three suspects Ghote named; Subbiah, Phaterpaker and Mahipal.

Known to have used airline stewardess Nicky D'Costa as a drugs mule and believed to have ordered her brutal murder when she became a police informant.

Subbiah eventually admits, in some distress, that she allowed Phaterpaker to persuade her to falsify results in her last experiments in order to publish a scientific paper ahead of an American team researching in the same area.

Admits that as a young man he was persuaded to "anticipate" the results of a medical experiment in order to lay first claim to a research breakthrough.

Ghote is as endearing as ever in this satisfying, entertaining mystery that conveys the rarefied atmosphere of elite scientific research and offers a host of intriguing secondary characters.

[3] Amazon.com also lists a customer review by "edwartel" [sic] that calls Asking Questions "a superior book".