A Murder on Malabar Hill

DON'T BE FOOLED AS I WAS !! THIS IS THE EXACT SAME AUTHOR/STORY AS HER OTHER BOOK "WIDOWS OF MALABAR HILL". Both were released in 2018 from different publishers with different titles, exact same story. I highly recommend either one of these if you haven't read her books. Just be warned, don't buy both!

(I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of the book for For The Love of Fictional Worlds) This was a intense and delightful vintage mystery novel – I use the word “vintage” purposefully for the author Sujata Massey does a freaking ah-mazing job of working her reader’s imagination of a time in our country’s past that tends to be intense and interesting for history buffs, like moi! Perveen Mistry is the only female practicing lawyer in 1921 Bombay – she can’t argue cases yet in the open court but definitely does her best work as a solicitor for her father’s practice. The book at its heart is a murder mystery; but that’s not all that it is! It is a slow yet informative plot that not only hooks the reader without them knowing about it, but it also a\does a very well introduction to the focus of the story – Perveen Mistry. Perveen Mistry honestly is DA BOMB! She is a dazzling heroine and it is difficult not to commiserate with the kind of environment she is faced with, all the while feeling that nothing much has changed, even in the 21st century! She is intelligent, feisty and gutsy yet compassionate and graceful. I couldn’t help but fall in love with her tenacity to blow through the road blocks that the society ended up oh so graciously providing her! As a reader, You go into book expecting to love or fall into the character’s lives just so you can escape your own for a while, and that’s exactly what happens when you open this book – and the credit for this only goes to Ms. Massey for her unpretentious yet effective writing style.

I honestly thought the author was married to a Parsi. Being one myself I wondered how she'd managed to capture the flavour of Parsis so accurately. After finishing the book I learnt about the amazing research Sujata Massey had carried out on the community. What the first lady lawyer had to go through in the 1920s was pretty devastating. Enjoyed the breadth of the story immensely - Perveen's relationships with her parents, her lover, his parents, her friend, those three widows and their kids was woven into a rich tapestry. Having lived in Bombay in my youth, the familiar setting was an added bonus. The only flaw, to me, was the depiction of danger to the heroine and other characters in the story. It got resolved far too quickly. That didn't prevent me from enjoying Murder At Malabar Hill.

Good historical fiction can both instruct and entertain the reader. Sujata Massey's new novel, "the Widows of Malabar Hill, certainly does both. Set mainly in Bombay (now Mumbai) and a bit in Calcutta (now Kolkata), the book goes back and forth between 1915 and 1921. The main character, Perveen Mistry, is the Oxford-educated daughter of a busy Bombay solicitor. She is the first female solicitor in India (the character is modeled after a real woman) and works with her father. Perveen has a failed marriage in her background and one of the interesting parts of the book involve that marriage and the machinations that went toward both the betrothal and the subsequent divorce. Perveen is tasked to help three widows of the same wealthy man, who are living in seclusion or "purdah". Their husband had died and there is much confusion and consternation over both the terms of the will and it's carrying out. A murder occurs and Perveen steps in to help solve it. Frankly, the "mystery" part of the book is the weakest; Massey writes much better about the lives of the characters, whether they are Hindu, Moslem, or Church of England, and about conditions of India under the British Raj. "The Widows of Malabar Hill" is the beginning of a series. If the others in the series are as good as this first book, I'll be back for more.

Combines historical fiction and mystery. Fascinating for just about anyone. The book takes place at the end of the British Raj period. I read this author with great fascination since I have recently learned I have East Asian Indian heritage. Read all of this author's books. Take a look at her mystery series set in modern day Japan. The 'detective' is a American who is half caucasian and half Japanese. Her name is, I believe, is Rei Shimura and she deals in Asian antiques while struggling to make a living in Japan. Fascinating!

Perveen Mistry is our Miss Fisher. Lovely book, story telling is awesome. The places, locations and characters are very well thought through. I am now a fan of Sujata Massey !

Good

I really enjoyed the time and place this book was set in, and the insight into what life was like for Indian women at the turn of last century. Really interesting themes, well drawn characters and a plot that kept me turning the pages.

I wasn't just impressed by this book - I was completely blown away. Not blown away as one might after reading a heavy Booker prize nominated work or something - no, just blown away about how a very approachable and almost classical murder mystery/detective fiction/legal thriller can also be so much more than a good masala read. I've been a big fan (isn't everyone?) of the whodunnit genre growing up - and it's still my go-to area when I'm suffering a readers block or something. The old Agatha Christie type never fails to suck you in and is still the best way to spend time unwinding. But as I've grown older I've always been aware in some way of it's 'foreign-ness' and craved for something more relatable? I loved reading Anthony Horowitz recently for e.g. but an Anthony Horowitz not set in an old English village or London or LA (looking at you Three Investigators, Perry Mason etc.) is what the heart craves. To that extent Sujata Massey's Perveen Mistry series seems to have created a character & a setting which seems perfect for an Indian English-reading audience (even though she's based in the US and doesn't necessarily write for an Indian audience) and hit the ball out of the park with it. It's an intelligent book with a plot which the blurb describes in a rather straightforward manner (so I won't recap it here), but let's just say - it's a realistic plot without too many narrative liberties (well OK there is this one time where our heroine escapes from a warehouse on the harbour from a gunny bag which she's tied in, but I'll let that pass). Which is not to say it eschews complexity either. Our protagonist Perveen is not a superhero, not unrealistically smart like Sherlock Holmes but a normal person with spunk and common sense and impetuousness who makes her fair share of mistakes. The other characters are also well fleshed out, consistent and largely in sync with what you would expect in that time and age with their gender, class, caste, and race roles. I particularly liked the 'wokeness' and the extent of it - perfectly balanced between being progressive and yet being realistic, with shades of grey for everyone (e.g. Jamshedji's obsequiousness towards the British) - not hitting us in the head about how progressive the good guys are and how regressive the bad guys are. It's clearly an extensively researched book and there's been an effort to be accurate down to the button about whatever is described - not just the legal proceedings but also clothing, food, rituals and social mores and especially life in Bombay. It's very educational especially in terms of giving an uncomplicated (but also not dumbed-down) picture of Indian upper-class society in the 1910's and 1920's (yes it exists a bit of an elite microcosm, but the key characters seem aware of that), the Bombay of that age, the differences between Parsis, Muslims and Hindus etc. I've grown up in Mumbai, and I particularly enjoyed this. Good fiction is always more educational than any non-fiction I always maintain :-) Since one must have something to quibble about - perhaps the solution to the murder is a bit subtle and undercovered only towards the end (which is probably how it happens in real life). But in a whodunnit, if the information has been in front of you - it really gives you that 'wow moment' - so maybe there was a lack of a punch towards the end, more a gradual uncovering which readers are conventionally used to. But I really found very little to complain about in this book and I can't really wait to read more. I'm in fact very very pleased to have come across this series. And if I ever go to Japan - I know it's Sujata Massey's Rei Sheimura series that I will be using to learn about the land :)

If you come across a book which has words like murder and investigate on its cover what will you do? Well if you are interested in a mystery, just like me, then surely such a title will intrigue you. So when I came across this title “A murder on Malabar Hill – Perveen Mistry Investigates” by Sujata Massey, I could not help myself. This Novel “A murder on Malabar Hill” is the first of the Praveen Mistry Investigates series of Novels. Praveen Mistry, the protagonist of the Novel is the first women Solicitor of Bombay and she works along with her father, Jamshedji Mistry, in their Law firm – Mistry Law. One day she is asked by her father to study the will of a client Omar Farid who had died recently; Omar Farid owned a textile mill and lived with his 3 wives and children in a bungalow on Malabar hill. In the will, she comes across a provision which raises her suspicion about all the three widows being duped of their inheritance. She fears that the widows, who are living a life of Seclusion or Parda, might not be aware of this. So she decides to investigate. Her investigation raises the tension in the household , leading to murder. As she continues her investigation, she also finds that her own life is in danger. Want to find what happens next? Well for that you would have to read this novel. The story also takes us to the turbulent past of Perveen’s life, which is very touching and inspiring. This Novel is set in the between 1917-1921 (Indian pre-independence era) and gives us a great view of that time period. The novel gives us an vivid insight into way of life of the people in India during that era When I was reading this book I virtually saw myself living in that era. The Protagonist of the Novel Perveen’s Character is inspired by India’s earliest Women Lawyers Cornelia Sorabji of Pune, who was the first woman to attend Oxford Law School and sit in the British Law exam in 1892 and also by Mithan Tata Lam of Bombay (now Mumbai), who also attended Oxford and was the first woman lawyer to be admitted to the Bombay Bar in 1923. Now this is a great trivia offered by this book, isn’t it? What I liked about the novel is: it kept me hooked and also made me wonder what’s going to happen next. It also took me into an era which gave a sneak peak of what India was and how Indians lived during that time. The only one Put Down of the Novel was in the middle where Perveen explains the details of the will to the widows. The details could have been summarized better, which would have done good to the pace of the book. Except for this, it made a good read and I do recommend it if you like mysteries.