My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa

 

First Line: There's a special place in hell for incompetent customer service agents, and it's right between monsters who stick their bare feet up on airplane seats and mansplainers.

 

Paloma should have known better than to sublet her apartment. If only she hadn't needed the money! Now her roommate has discovered her deepest, darkest secret and is demanding cash for his silence. Paloma thought she'd never have to think of those years in a Sri Lankan orphanage again. Now she's thirty, cut off from her parents' funds, and at the mercy of a blackmailer.

 

When she can't come up with the money, Paloma has no alternative but to stand up to her roommate, but when she goes back to the apartment, she finds him facedown in a pool of blood at the kitchen table. In shock, she runs from the apartment, but by the time the police arrive, there is no body... no sign that her roommate ever existed. Paloma is convinced that this is all tied into what she had to do to escape Sri Lanka all those years ago, but did those secrets die with her roommate, or is she in even more danger?

 

~

 

There should be a bright future ahead of author Amanda Jayatissa, and I'm basing my opinion simply on how her mind worked as she constructed the plot for My Sweet Girl. There are enough twists and turns to satisfy any reader who loves surprises-- or who loves to attempt to figure them out ahead of time. The book does fall victim to a couple of things that did lessen my enjoyment, however.

 

At 384 pages, the book has "too much middle," as a fellow mystery lover calls it. If the story had been tightened up, the second thing would not have annoyed me nearly as much. What is the second thing? Paloma, the main character herself. Through the first third of the book, I felt bad for Paloma. Her voice is filled with judgment, with profanity, with anger, with fear, with guilt. The judgmental attitude I could overlook to a great extent as well as the profanity. Besides, the way Paloma tells her story really made me want to know what made her so fearful, so angry, so guilty. But these strong emotions went on and on and on. If the book had had more editing to tighten everything up, I would not have had time to either deduce the main plot twist or to become increasingly annoyed with Paloma. But it didn't, and I did.

 

Yes, I did have some problems with My Sweet Girl, but there's a lot to like about this story that shows us the lengths to which people will go when they are absolutely desperate. On the strength of her plot and Paloma's voice, I'll be keeping an eye peeled for Jayatissa's next book. 

My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa

eISBN: 9780593335109

Berkley © 2021

eBook, 384 pages

 

Standalone Thriller

Rating: C+

Source: Net Galley

Dark Clouds Over Nuala by Harriet Steel

First Lines: New Year's Eve 1933. Western Australia. As the minutes to midnight ticked away, ever greater numbers of revellers crowded into the noisy bar.

The most prestigious entry on the 1935 racing calendar is the Empire Cup, and with the added bonus of the presence of the heir to a British earldom, everyone in the hill town of Nuala wants to go to the race course to take a look and add to the gossip mill. Others, like Inspector Shanti de Silva and his wife Jane, have been invited to dinner at the Residence to meet the heir, Ralph Wynne-Talbot and his wife Jane. The couple is stopping in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) before boarding a ship bound for England, and entertainments have been planned for them. But their hunting trip goes horribly wrong when someone dies.

Inspector de Silva is summoned to the scene, and it doesn't take him long to decide that this death is not an accident; it's murder. Now all he has to do is prove it, and that won't be easy with a rich Romanian count, the count's glamorous wife, and a mysterious British army officer (and all sorts of British government officials) to deal with.

After having read the first book in the series, Trouble in Nuala, I looked forward to reading the second entry. I was not disappointed. I enjoy the relationship between the biracial couple of de Silva and his wife Jane. They met and married later in life, and not only are they deeply in love, but de Silva also values Jane's opinions on all sorts of subjects. It doesn't hurt that Jane is an Agatha Christie fan so she can provide some help in solving her husband's mysteries.

Set in the 1930s, Steel's series shows some of the problems and culture clashes of colonial-era Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In Dark Clouds Over Nuala, these problems mainly consist of native-born de Silva circumventing the British Old Boys Network in order to solve a crime involving a prominent British family. The mystery is a convoluted one, but I recently watched an episode of Miss Marple that helped me find my way through all the clues. (No, I won't tell you the episode!)

The author does an excellent job of providing enough background in each book so readers won't feel lost if they pick up a volume in the middle. This also helps if a reader just wants to sample and not to commit to the entire series. Steel's books satisfy on several levels: characterization, mystery, and the food and culture of Sri Lanka in the 1930s. I'll be coming back for more, and-- if you sample one of Inspector de Silva's mysteries-- chances are that you will be, too.

Dark Clouds Over Nuala by Harriet Steel

ASIN: B071H6PW9M

Stane Street Press © 2017

eBook, 228 pages

Historical Mystery, #2 Inspector de Silva mystery

Rating: B+

Source: Purchased from Amazon.


 

Trouble in Nuala by Harriet Steel

First Line: Inspector Shanti de Silva exhaled a deep sigh of relief as the train left the sweltering lowlands of Colombo and commenced the long climb to Kandy.

After moving from the city of Colombo to the hill town of Nuala, Inspector Shanti de Silva and his wife Jane appreciate the slower pace of life. All that changes when a mix of a cruel and arrogant plantation owner, his lonely wife, and a crusading lawyer turns deadly. The inspector is going to need all of his experience to solve this crime.

Inspector de Silva and his English wife Jane waited until they were in their forties to marry. Yes, they'd finally met the person they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with, but they were also old enough to know their own minds and not care about any raised eyebrows. Why the raised eyebrows? Because it is 1930s colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and mixed marriages aren't quite the done thing. Shanti enjoys reading classics like Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe while Jane prefers Agatha Christie. Shanti loves the spicy foods of his native Ceylon and finds English food bland and heavy. Jane would never eat chilis for breakfast. These two main characters in Harriet Steel's Trouble in Nuala are fun to get to know-- and there's more.

This book has a marvelous sense of time and place. Readers learn about a country under British colonial rule and the problems with which it must deal. Not only that, but the descriptions of the landscape and wildlife of Ceylon are vivid and help to bring the whole book to life. Two examples:  farmers set off firecrackers to scare away wild elephants and prevent them from destroying crops, and then there are stunning scenes like "the startling lime-green splash of a paddy field where egrets stood like white question marks."

Although the killer's identity isn't all that difficult to deduce, my appetite for the other books in this series will not be denied. The only real problem I have with Trouble in Nuala is that it's too short!

Trouble in Nuala by Harriet Steel

ASIN: B01K7VSGO8

Stane Street Press © 2016

eBook, 200 pages

Historical Mystery, #1 Inspector de Silva mystery

Rating: B+

Source: Purchased from Amazon.