Tag Archives: Fiction

I Try to Solve an Uzma Jalaluddin Mystery | Detective Aunty (Kausar Khan)

Posted on by
Reply

I wish I’d made chai for this occasion, but the truth is that I didn’t intend to try and solve Detective Aunty until I had a flash of insight in the middle of Chapter 26 that convinced me I knew who the killer was. If you’ve read the book, or oh my gosh, if you’re Uzma Jalaluddin herself, and know that the vital clue has not been dropped yet by this point, then please feel free to laugh at my hubris! Either way, I’m going to go with my gut and lock my guess in.

As some of my friends know, Uzma Jalaluddin is my die-hard auto-buy author. I loved Ayesha at Last, absolutely adored Hana Khan Carries On, and gave my heart over to Much Ado About Nada. And as long-time readers of this blog will know, I absolutely ADORE cozy mysteries, especially those by Agatha Christie, so when I learned about Detective Aunty, I had it on my buy list long before the actual release date.

Kausar Khan is a widow in her mid-50s who has always had a knack for observation and mystery-solving. When her mid-30s daughter, Sana, is the prime suspect in a murder, Kausar leaves her comfy home in North Bay to help her daughter out. The victim, Imran Thakur, is the landlord at the shopping plaza where Sana owns a desi clothing store; he was found at her store before hours, stabbed with a dagger from the window display. By many accounts, Imran is a terrible person, who cares only about making money, and isn’t above taking advantage of people to get it.

Long-time Jalaluddin fans will be thrilled to note that the mystery takes place in the Golden Crescent shopping plaza in Scarborough. It’s a nice shoutout to the Golden Crescent neighbourhood in Jalaluddin’s romances, though if there are any fun crossover Easter eggs, I missed them. (I was especially on the look out for Three Sisters Biryani Poutine to make an appearance, but alas, no.)

Long-time mystery fans will enjoy Kausar Khan as a detective. The obvious parallel is Miss Marple: like Christie’s sleuth, Kausar is often underestimated due to her age, and strategic meekness with a dupatta. Like the Marple novels, Detective Aunty is an insightful skewering of society’s often dismissive attitudes towards older women. Kausar gets away with bold questioning of suspects, and at one point, with actually getting caught snooping in a private area, simply because people assume she’s just after gossip for the neighbourhood aunties’ group chat.

Jalaluddin adds her own touches to the Marple archetype: Kausar is much younger for one, only in her mid-50s. This opens up possibilities for romance (LOVE that subplot!), and also a different sort of energy: while Marple is content to knit and quietly make her observations, Kausar is set for her next stage in life. Having married young, and been a stay-at-home mom all her life, widowhood now gives her the chance to live on her own, and discover for herself who she is, independent of her husband and his career. There are cultural and generational nuances that add richness to Kausar’s journey, and I’m totally here for it.

Kausar is also more overtly feisty than Miss Marple. While Christie’s detective veils her razor sharp barbs with a gentle veneer of wide-eyed harmlessness, Kausar doesn’t hesitate to let hers fly. For example, while dealing with an infuriatingly condescending man, she snaps that they’re so close in age that he should call her Mrs. Khan, not Aunty. Then she gives him a saccharine sweet smile, because, of course, she was only being polite.

Finally, Kausar also has shades of Sherlock Holmes. She makes observations about physical details, that then lead to major clues. The parallels are a bit more subtle, but like Holmes, her talent for observation doesn’t always rub people the right way.

Overall, I’m absolutely adoring this book. I love Kausar, and I LOVE her sidekick BFFs, May in North Bay and Fatima in Toronto. I also like the romance brewing between her and the silver fox lawyer, and I love all the complexities of her family relationships. There’s so much rich material here for the series, and I’m excited to see where Jalaluddin takes this.

Did I Solve It?

No, I didn’t, not even close. I was so far off-base, in fact, that the character I’d selected as the killer wasn’t even invited to Kausar’s big reveal gathering. When I fail, I fail spectacularly.

Honestly, the actual big reveal made me sad. Jalaluddin did a great job at making me care for some of these characters, and I felt bad for how things are likely to unfold for them after this reveal.

On the bright side, the novel does end with a bit of a teaser for the next mystery. Kausar Khan will be back at Golden Crescent someday (hopefully soon!), and I’m really excited to see more of her story unfold.

***SPOILERS BELOW***

Continue reading →

I Try to Solve an Agatha Christie Mystery | The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (Miss Marple)

Posted on by
Reply

Trying to solve The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side is a bit of a bittersweet experience. It’s the final Miss Marple novel I haven’t yet read or tried to solve. After a staunch almost life-long preference for Poirot, I’ve grown to prefer Miss Marple in recent years. I mean, really, how awesome is it for a little old lady with white hair and pink cheeks to be the most brilliant crime-solving mind around? And while Agatha Christie mysteries are always a pleasure to re-read, I admit I’ll miss matching wits with dear old Aunt Jane, and trying to solve the mystery before she does.

Still, as the very pragmatic Jane Marple herself would say, the end will have to come at some time, and all one can do is face it when it does. (Except of course, she would say it much more eloquently. Because my goodness, Agatha Christie, the writer you are!)

Mirror features one of my favourite elements in a murder mystery: the glamour of a movie being made! A famous film star, Marina Gregg, moves to St Mary Mead (Gossington Hall, to be exact, where Mrs. Bantry from The Body in the Library used to live!). She and her husband, Jason Rudd, throw a fete for the neighbourhood, and invite a select group of 30 or 40 local luminaries into their home for drinks.

Among the guests is Heather Badcock, a kindly, if rather thoughtless and self-centred, woman, who is totally starstruck by Marina. At the party, she excitedly tells Marina about how kind the actress was when they first met years ago. Marina is super polite and gracious until something over Heather’s shoulder catches her attention, and she gets a terrible look on her face that reminds Mrs. Bantry of The Lady of Shalott (where the book’s title comes from).

Later in the party, Heather dies from a poisoned daiquiri. Except it turns out that, due to a spilled drink, it was actually Marina’s daiquiri she drank. We also learn that Marina has received threatening letters, and that there are many people in her life with reasons to hold grudges. Whodunnit? Why? And can Miss Marple solve the case before the killer strikes again?

I have a really strong gut feel about the answer to this mystery, and I’m going to go ahead and lock it in.

Did I Solve It?

I did! I actually did!

Also, my goodness, those last couple of chapters were filled with other twists I DID NOT see coming. So, brava, Dame Agatha Christie! The title Queen of Crime is very much well-earned.

That’s it for me and Miss Marple on this blog then. Fortunately, I believe I still have quite a few Poirot mysteries as well as non-series mysteries that I can try to solve!

***SPOILERS BELOW***

Continue reading →

I Try to Solve an Agatha Christie Mystery | Sad Cypress (Hercule Poirot)

Posted on by
Reply

Sad Cypress begins with a courtroom scene: Elinor Carlisle is accused of murdering Mary Gerrard. She had several reasons to dislike Mary: first and most hurtful, the man Elinor loves, Roddy, is in love with Mary instead. Then, shortly before her aunt, Mrs. Welman’s, death, Elinor receives an anonymous letter, warning her that Mary, the daughter of Mrs. Welman’s tenants, is after her aunt’s fortune.

Sure enough, one night when Mrs. Welman is seriously ill, she asks Elinor to call her solicitor; she wants to make provisions for Mary in her will. Unfortunately, she dies before the solicitor can be called, and it turns out she never made a will at all. Having died intestate, her entire fortune goes to Elinor, who then honours her aunt’s wishes by giving Mary a generous sum from the estate.

Some weeks later, Elinor is cleaning out her aunt’s estate. She invites Mary and Mary’s friend, Nurse Hopkins, to join her for lunch. And Mary ends up dead, killed by morphine while Elinor and Nurse Hopkins were washing dishes. Elinor is arrested for the death, but fortunately, her aunt’s doctor, Peter Lord, is convinced of her innocence, and enlists the help of Hercule Poirot to prove it.

I loved reading this mystery! I had great fun parsing through the clues, and adding my little kitty sticky notes to pages with clues, ideas, or comments I wanted to mark. Whodunnit feels pretty straightforward; I had a bad guy in mind from the start, and now a few pages from the big reveal, I still think that person’s the most likely culprit.

I admit I was also tempted to let my mind spin out into wild alternative theories. Certainly, there are enough gossipy tidbits and long-ago scandals to throw suspicion on other individuals. But at my last attempt at solving an Agatha Christie mystery, the solution turned out to be simpler than I expected, so I’m going to go against the grain here, and stick with the simplest reveal. I’ll type it below, and then lock it in.

Did I Solve It?

Nope. My other strong suspect turned out to be the killer, but I ultimately ended up accusing someone else. To my credit, I did pick up on a lot of the important clues; I just figured there must have been another reason behind them. Bah, Dame Agatha, you’ve fooled me again!

***SPOILERS BELOW***

Continue reading →