Nilima Rao's debut mystery A Disappearance in Fiji is as much a coming-of-age story as it is a mystery. Twenty-five-year-old Sergeant Akal Singh is very much a young man of his time. He's intelligent and hard-working, but incredibly naive in affairs of the heart, and he tends to view everyone he meets through his blinders of caste and personhood. His relationship with Inspector-General Thurstrom is a thorny one. Thurstrom lost his favorite police officer when the man enlisted to go fight in World War I. He knows the reason why Akal was sent to Fiji, and he'd just as soon the young man vanish in a puff of smoke, never to be seen again. The only bright spot in Akal's working life is twenty-six-year-old Taviti, the local chief's nephew, who longs to do some real police work instead of being stuck at the front desk of the station.
The scales begin to be removed from Akal's eyes when he goes to the sugarcane plantation with Dr. Robert Holmes. There Akal comes face to face with the brutal realities of the indentured workers' lives and the racism of the British colonialists in Fiji as he interviews white plantation owners, the Indian indentured laborers, and native Fijians.
Even though the mystery in A Disappearance in Fiji is rather easy to solve, the book is a vivid snapshot of a landscape and a time period. With Akal, Taviti, and Holmes, Rao has created a cast that grabbed my attention and makes me want to know more about them, to follow along as they solve more mysteries. And as for those mysteries, there is an unsolved one at the end of the book, and I'm looking forward to finding out if Akal and the others can learn the identity of the Night Prowler in the next book. Bring it on!
(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley)
The scales begin to be removed from Akal's eyes when he goes to the sugarcane plantation with Dr. Robert Holmes. There Akal comes face to face with the brutal realities of the indentured workers' lives and the racism of the British colonialists in Fiji as he interviews white plantation owners, the Indian indentured laborers, and native Fijians.
Even though the mystery in A Disappearance in Fiji is rather easy to solve, the book is a vivid snapshot of a landscape and a time period. With Akal, Taviti, and Holmes, Rao has created a cast that grabbed my attention and makes me want to know more about them, to follow along as they solve more mysteries. And as for those mysteries, there is an unsolved one at the end of the book, and I'm looking forward to finding out if Akal and the others can learn the identity of the Night Prowler in the next book. Bring it on!
(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley)
