Death in the Air
Ratings1
Average rating3
15
Ratings1
Average rating3
“Glamorous, gripping, absolutely heaps of fun. I loved this.”—Lucy Foley, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Guest List and The Paris Apartment "Unexpected delights await on every page of Ram Murali’s impressive and captivating debut. Crisp as a gin and tonic and delightfully wicked, this smart, smart novel delivers a sophisticated, subversive murder mystery set in the highest stratosphere of the international idle rich. I had to force myself not to binge it in one night so I could savor it like the rare and exquisite meal that it is." —Kevin Kwan, New York Times bestselling author of Crazy Rich Asians The White Lotus meets Knives Out meets Crazy Rich Asians in this devilishly entertaining debut novel: both a sophisticated locked-room mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie, and a provocative literary whodunit for the twenty-first century. Ro Krishna is the American son of Indian parents, educated at the finest institutions, equally at home in London’s poshest clubs and on the squash court, but unmoored after he is dramatically forced to leave a high-profile job under mysterious circumstances. He decides it’s time to check in for some much-needed R&R at Samsara, a world-class spa for the global cosmopolitan elite nestled in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas. A person could be spiritually reborn in a place like this. Even a very rich person. But a person—or several—could also die there. Samsara is the Sanskrit word for the karmic cycle of death and rebirth, after all. And as it turns out, the colorful cast of characters Ro meets—including a misanthropic politician; an American movie star preparing for his Bollywood crossover debut; a beautiful heiress to a family jewel fortune that barely survived Partition; and a bumbling white yogi inexplicably there to teach meditation—harbors a murderer among them. Maybe more than one. As the death toll rises, Ro, a lawyer by training and a sleuth by circumstance, becomes embroiled in a vicious world under a gilded surface, where nothing is quite what it seems . . . including Ro himself. Death in the Air is a brilliant, teasing mystery from a remarkable new talent.
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I have learned of books through many ways: word-of-mouth from friends, YouTube recommendations, ads in Barnes and Noble, ads on airplanes, Reddit comments, reading random articles that aren’t even about books and so on. One way I hadn’t learned of a book before was from watching a game show. That changed with this book, which I learned about because its author Ram Murali, was on Jeopardy!. He mentioned he was a writer and I liked him on the show, so I ordered the book.
The back part of the cover jacket says that this is Murali’s first novel and you can tell. He clearly has a lot of really interesting ideas but I don’t think they’re expressed in the best or most interesting way. One of the first rules of writing is ‘show, don’t tell’ and there is so much telling in this book, to the point that it detracts from my enjoyment of the story. This characteristic of Murali’s writing unfortunately bleeds into the characters as well, leading many of the supporting ones to be one-note caricatures.
With that said, I did enjoy parts of Death in the Air. The mystery itself is quite interesting and you can tell that Murali is a fan of the classics like the works of Agatha Christie in the way he drops clues. I will also give him credit for writing a really convoluted plot that does in fact make sense at the end. Murali is capable of writing a strong plot, and in a mystery novel that’s extremely important.
I will also say that it’s possible that I’m just missing things about this book. It primarily takes place in India and many issues specific to Indian culture are discussed throughout. I am not remotely familiar with many of the topics Murali talks about here and it’s likely that I would have enjoyed the book if I knew more about what Murali was talking about.
So what do you get when you have a mystery book with ok characters but an intriguing plot? You get a pretty ok whodunnit. I can’t say that I would recommend this to anyone looking for something new to read, but I do think fans of this genre will find something to like here.
I really wanted to love this. I love a locked room mystery, particularly one when people are on vacation. I enjoyed the storytelling but there was wayyyy too much detail in some scenes and then entire other scenes were skipped over.
The piece that bugged me the most: why in the world was Ro allowed to be so involved in the investigation??
