The second novel in Harini Nagendra’s charming series featuring new bride and fledgling detective, Kaveri Murthy, finds Kaveri struggling to get along with her mother in law, Bhargavi. When Bhargavi asks Kaveri as a favor to look into an embezzlement at her cousin’s husband’s factory, she reluctantly agrees, even though she feels unqualified to take on this job. When she goes to meet her mother in law’s cousin at the factory, the two women enter the factory, and find the man dead. Somehow Nagendra manages to make this almost expected death shocking and terrible, and Kaveri is caught up in taking the grieving woman back home and getting her settled. Now that the embezzlement has turned to murder, Kaveri knows she wants to investigate.
These books are skillful traditional mysteries, with the added interest of being set in 1920’s Bangalore. Kaveri, married at 14, has just recently come to live with her husband, Ramu, and happily, the two have discovered they actually love each other. In the first novel, The Bangalore Detectives Club, Nagendra set up the story as a backdrop to this lovely discovery. In this second novel, we see Kaveri setting up her own social network, one begun in the last novel.
This is complicated by the murder case, and someone seems to have it in for Kaveri. She’s gained a name for herself as a detective – including a brass plate on her backyard shed – and her notoriety has gained her some unwelcome attentions. Kaveri’s social network consists of a raggedy group of women, including a former prostitute, whom she is teaching to read and write. Her mother in law is not so sure about this mixing of classes, but Kaveri is blissfully unbothered by these social niceties.
None of what Nagendra writes about is truly ground breaking, but she absolutely excels as an entertaining and thoughtful storyteller, utilizing appealing characters to tell her stories. This novel is more straightforward than the first book, and places Kaveri in danger a few times, which serves to highlight the true affection and regard Ramu holds for his wife.
The dead man’s wife, Shanthi, has arranged for her step daughter, Chitra, to marry the manager of the factory. Chitra is not happy about this, and Kaveri gets conflicting accounts of their relationship to the dead man from each woman. She’s not sure who to believe, and she places a woman she knows as a maid inside the house to see if she can find more answers. Everything is complicated, of course, by Bhargavi’s affection for her cousin.
The social matrix and the details of daily life make the book an indelible read. For example, there’s the fact that it was unusual for Kaveri to drive a car at the time. There’s the starving boys selling dead rats at the police station for a few pennies for food. There’s the idea that a factory owner could choose to pay poor wages, or pay wages allowing workers to send their children to school. There’s the dog show that kicks off the novel, with the ugliest dog of all ending up in Kaveri’s back yard. And overall there are the lives of the women in the story, whose fate is often governed by the men they marry or encounter, for good or ill.
Whatever the magical formula is for a series that’s readable, loveable, and that truly sparkles on the page, Nagendra seems to possess it. She’s the real deal. The first two books are totally delightful and hold the promise of more delights to come. — Robin Agnew