Description

In the genteel hill town of Munnar, Kerala, on a misty Sunday morning in the second week of January, retired tea-estate manager Mr. Cherian Punnoose is found dead in the rose garden of his colonial bungalow — shot once, neatly, between the 8:30 a.m. church service and the 12:30 p.m. family lunch.

Inspector Padmaja Iyer of the Kerala Crime Branch — newly back in Munnar after a difficult Trivandrum posting, single, prickly, and quietly the sharpest investigator in the state — arrives at the bungalow by Sunday evening and is immediately presented with the kind of suspect list mystery readers dream about. The estranged Goa-based son, who flew in the previous night. The much-younger second wife. The Tamil estate manager who had been quietly altering the books. The childhood friend, now an MLA, with whom Punnoose had publicly fallen out over a land deal. The lonely English widow next door who had been seen, on three separate Tuesdays, leaving the bungalow after dark.

And then there is the small matter of the locked drawer in Mr. Punnoose’s study, which contained a single yellowed photograph — and which, by the time Padmaja arrives, has been very recently, very carefully, emptied.

Atmospheric, intricately plotted, and quietly funny, *The Sunday Murder* is a classic-style Indian mystery in the great tradition of Agatha Christie and Anita Desai — a small-town puzzle with a sharp-tongued detective you will not stop reading until the last page.