I sometimes put down Shoba Rao’s new book as I read it, having fun comparing her novel, Indian Country, to a classic work that’s a little bit similar and a whole lot different. Okay, to an Adam Dalgleish mystery by P.D. James. I meant no disrespect to Rao by flipping between the two. In fact, I enjoyed Indian Country, which is many things, including a murder mystery. That’s why P.D. James came into it—and why I began to think about the structure of mystery novels. 

Rao’s story starts off slowly as she introduces her two protagonists, Sagar and Janavi, whom we see facing family trauma at home in India. Sagar is blamed when his younger brother is injured. Janavi’s mother dies tragically. Eventually they marry and move to Montana, where they come to know members of an Indigenous tribe. Rao leaves the tribe unnamed, although white folks call the people Indians. So a couple of Indians from the sub-continent meet a group of American Indians in Custer County. As in George Custer? The Battle of Little Big Horn? It’s obvious from the start things aren’t going to go well. 

Sagar is a hydraulic engineer hired to oversee the technical side of dismantling an old dam on the fictitious Cotton River. Janavi is a social worker. At least, she was before her marriage. As a child, Janavi lost her mother in a fatal car accident, and later finds her calling struggling to save street kids from child trafficking rings. After moving to Montana, Janavi is adrift: friendless, jobless, lacking a U.S. work permit. She also barely knows her husband. Sagar was supposed to marry Janavi’s sister in a marriage long arranged between their families. When the sister falls in love with another man, Janavi reluctantly agrees to marry Sagar in her place and move to the States. 

 “Janavi” is one of the many names of India’s great Ganges River, and rivers are more than a motif in this novel. They’re the governing principle. The narrative meanders between India and Montana, sometimes rambling from the present to the past as Rao drops in vignettes about historical characters. These brief forays are set on the banks of the Ganges and the Cotton, most of them featuring interlopers overcome by supernatural forces, the dates slowly flowing closer to the present day. 

Gradually we come to know Janavi and Sagar as two lost, hesitant and genuinely good people. They’re well-matched, although neither realizes this at the start of their hastily-arranged marriage. Both are also painfully lonely after they arrive in Montana, even after each finds friends among the locals. Sagar gets to know Renny Atwood, an Indigenous archeologist excavating a native burial site that will be flooded when the dam is removed. Janavi finds a connection with sparky Mandy, who works in the local convenience store. Yet neither woman can lighten the solitude both Janavi and Sagar feel inside their unconsummated union. 

The dam project develops as slowly as the couple’s relationship. It’s aging, no longer useful, and its removal is supported by the Indigenous people. They want the river freed from concrete to return to its natural course. But Sam Dooley, mayor of the nearby town of Mansfield, wants the dam to stay in place. 

Dooley is the scion of Mansfield’s most prominent family, I don’t think it’s an accident that the town’s name echoes the title of Jane Austen’s novel, Mansfield Park. In Austen’s book, the wealth of Mansfield Park’s owners comes from a West Indian plantation worked by enslaved people. Rao is signalling that there’s something immoral about Sam, something hidden, although the reason for his opposition to the dam removal seems clear enough. He owns riverfront property that will be left high and dry if the Cotton changes course. 

Then one day Renny is found drowned below the dam. The police rule her death accidental, yet Dooley and his allies use the tragedy to halt the removal. Sagar is accused of mismanaging the engineering—scapegoated, he believes—and quickly fired. He and Janavi will have to leave Montana before their visas expire in six months.

But what if Renny was murdered? And what if Sagar and Janavi can prove it before they have to leave? And what if they manage to solve the deeper mystery behind Renny’s death, one that’s linked to a human fingerbone she found by the river? It isn’t an ancestral bone from the dig she’s been conducting. Instead, it might be a relic from a group of disappearances several years before that no one is willing to talk about, certainly not with Janavi and Sagar.

This is where I paused to consider murders and mysteries in fiction.

Let me start by saying that I recently finished an entirely unrelated book, a memoir. I didn’t plan to read it again, so I put it in a Little Free Library down the street with no intention of taking out another book. (House purge.) 

But inside the little library was a cozy mystery. Since I’d never read anything in the cozy genre, I took it home. I’ve been writing a novel that isn’t a mystery, but revolves around a crime. My main character is one of the victims of a school shooting, and a detective keeps showing up. I’ve got to like him, and one day I might write a detective novel in which he features. So, off and on, I’ve been reading mysteries as research. 

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A vignette:

I was working on a film script and looking for help in plotting a fictional crime. I asked my brother, a Crown attorney—a prosecutor—if he knew a cop who might talk to me. He suggested a detective nearing retirement, a guy who said he planned to write detective novels afterward. Maybe we could do a tit-for-tat. He’d help plot my crime. I could tell him about writing courses.

The phone rang.

“Your brother says you’re going to buy me lunch.”

Without any other preamble, the detective and I discussed which Greek restaurant he liked and when to meet. I said my hair was long and light brown and I’d be wearing a brown coat.

“I look like a cop,” he said.  

He was right. I knew him as soon as he walked in. The overcoat, the highly-polished brogues. Over lunch, he helped me immensely with my plot and listened as I offered to help him with his writing. I never heard from him again.

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In any case—stay with me here—the cozy mystery quickly proved boring. The main problem? I didn’t care about the murder victim, who came into the narrative late and never got filled out as a character. I’m not going to name the book, since I find it a little mean to write about books I don’t like (although I loved taking down Spare by Prince Harry). 

Now here’s my first point: Check your annoyance levels. Did the detours I just made annoy you? Because Shoba Rao’s book moves forward with the same sort of riverine digressions. If you read what I just wrote and said to yourself, “For God’s sake, get on it with it,” maybe Indian Country isn’t for you. But if you enjoyed reading something more leisurely and cumulative than the normal bam-bam-bam of modern discourse, you might give it a try. (And check out the hyperlinks for more vignettes. Just a suggestion.)

My second point involves P.D. James. After depositing the cozy mystery back in the little library, I pulled A Certain Justice off my shelves, having remembered how thoroughly James sets up her murder victims. 

It begins:

“Murderers do not usually give their victims notice. This is one death which, however terrible that last second of appalled realization, comes mercifully burdened with anticipatory terror. When, on the afternoon of Wednesday, 11th September, Venetia Aldridge stood up to examine the prosecution’s chief witness in the case of Regina v. Ashe she had four weeks, four hours, and fifty minutes left of life. After her death the many who had admired her and the few who had liked her, searching for a more personal response than the stock adjectives of horror and outrage, found themselves muttering that it would have pleased Venetia that her last case of murder had been tried at the Bailey, scene of her greatest triumphs, and in her favourite court.”

We can put the date aside, since the book was published in 1997. What’s important here is that, after setting up her murder, James follows Venetia through the last four weeks, four hours and fifty minutes of her time on earth, fleshing out her personality while peopling the narrative with characters who might want her dead, and may or may not end up murdering her. I’d forgotten whodunnit and got hooked again on the mystery, wanting to find out what had happened. I didn’t like Venetia but I was fascinated by her. So here was confirmation: one of the biggest mistakes the cozy mystery writer made lay in failing to develop her murder victim. The pros know it’s crucial. 

Then I picked up Indian Country, which I’d been told was a murder mystery. I quickly forgot about the billing as I read, moved by the stories of Janavi’s and Sagar’s childhoods, their arranged marriage and their first months in Montana. What murder? Who needs a murder?

Then I reached page 211, a little more than halfway through the book. The work crew cuts the first notch of four in the dam the way Sagar has planned, and they cheer as water from the reservoir begins to drain through it.

“But none of them would see the second notch for a long time to come, and Renny? Renny would never see it. Because two days later, on a cloudless Saturday afternoon, she was drawn through the first notch and found dead, hours later, at the base of the Cotton River dam.”

A sudden death, not foreshadowed. Flipping back, I discovered that Renny was only fully introduced on page 90, didn’t reappear for 30 more pages, and made only sporadic appearances between then and her death. But Shoba Rao is very good at characterization, and even though Renny doesn’t appear often, she’s both engaging and memorable when she does. 

For one thing, there’s her sense of humour. This is a poetically-written book but not a solemn one. When Sagar first meets Renny, he gets her name wrong, and later apologizes profusely, “to which Renny, who’d seemed so serious when he’d met her, winked and said, ‘I’ll let it slide this time, since you’re Indian.’”

Closing the book, I picked up P.D. James again, thinking more about how to portray a murder victim. It’s not only about making the reader feel invested in their fates. Readers have to be interested in victims but—an important but—we can’t like them too much. If we do, the book becomes too upsetting, less of an intellectual cat-and-mouse game and more of a gut-wrenching drama. The murder feels real.

James keeps readers from feeling too much sympathy for Venetia Aldridge by making her arrogant, self-involved and a dreadful mother. Shoba Rao does it with Renny Atwood by not letting her play too great a role in the narrative. She appears, gets off some good lines, then disappears again. We like her without feeling attached. 

I also thought about the fact P.D. James only introduces her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, on page 162. She can easily wait, having written about Dalgleish in nine previous mysteries. But Rao needs to spend time at the beginning of the story to introduce her “detectives,” Sagar and Janavi. We don’t just have to like them. After the murder, we also have to believe that they’re capable of solving a crime. On both counts, Rao delivers.

So unlike the cozy mystery author, Shoba Rao successfully ticks off a couple of boxes when structuring her mystery novel. And if you think I’m going in too hard on technical matters, please remember that technique is crucial to how readers respond to a book, even if they don’t always recognize it. I checked ratings on Goodreads for the cozy mystery, and it’s the least popular of the author’s books. Readers call it a mis-step, unengaging, uninvolving, flat, although not all appear able to say why they didn’t like it. Rao succeeds because she creates plausible and engaging characters, including the one she plans to kill off.

Once Renny is dead, the focus of Indian Country shifts to her murder. And here I found a couple of problems. For one thing, the change felt too sudden. I’m speaking of subject matter, not the pacing. The novel continues to meander between vignettes and hits of the present-day story, slowly revealing a growing closeness between Janavi and Sagar while following their attempts to figure out why someone—who?— wanted Renny dead. There’s a chance meeting in a bar with a mysterious elder. Janavi’s nascent bond with an unhappy child. Rao also continues to insert historical vignettes that reach closer to the present day, although there’s one addition I question. 

Toward the end of the novel, Rao raises the issue of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. This is a tragic and complex matter, and one I felt was insufficiently respected in Rao’s narrative, almost tacked on in an attempt to add depth to her story. It didn’t need to be there for me to care about Renny, or to understand that Indigenous women are unsafe in modern society. I ended up feeling that if the issue was going to be there at all, it needed to reverberate from the beginning of the book to end. Instead, it reads like an after-thought.

So Indian Country has its failings. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, since I like novels that are quirky and well-written, with complex characters who don’t react predictably. Rao’s book also exists outside the creative-writing-school paradigm of novels about creative writing school graduates. If I see another protagonist characterized by having gone to Brown rather than Yale, I will vomit. It’s a relief to read about someone like Janavi who loves Slurpees, and longs for onions and capsicum on her pizza.

Rao doesn’t tie her story up neatly. It ends as it begins, with a discussion on the banks of the Cotton River between the Indigenous mythological figures of Porcupine, Younger Brother and Older Brother. I see in interviews that Rao consulted her friend Adam Bad Wound of the Lakota people about these sections, and maybe that helped her avoid using the trio’s second appearance as a pat ending to the book. They’re not all-seeing and all-knowing. In fact, as the story closes, we don’t know whether Sagar and Janavi will go back to India, or what happens to the troubled child Janavi has grown to care for. Nor do we learn the fate of the man who murdered Renny. 

Yet the ambiguity fits. Throughout her novel, Shoba Rao’s characters are challenged by the radical uncertainty of life, its complexity and unwanted surprises. And in finishing her book, I found it satisfying that despite their traumas—or because of them—Sagar and Janavi are finally able to take solace in married love.

Indian Country by Shoba Rao is published by Penguin Random House. You can buy it here.