Mohammedan law is complex and unfamiliar to her, as are the dynamics of a multiwife family. Her intent is to make sure she understands the finer points of the trustee’s request.

Since the widows are Muslim and cannot mingle with men, Perveen visits them to iron out the details. Dowers are an inheritance guaranteed a woman after her spouse dies or divorces her, and wakfs are endowments that provide funds to a chosen charity while paying dividends to the inheritors. The estate’s trustee, Faisal Mukri, has informed the Mistry House legal firm that the widows want to give up their dowers and donate them to the family wakf. Omar Farid leaves behind the three widows that give the novel its title. Perveen is working for her father’s law firm when one of their clients passes away. She drew attention to the injustice these women risked when their husbands died, a knotty and compelling issue that drives the plot of The Widows of Malabar Hill. Sorabji took a great interest in social reform, and along with child marriage, she was concerned about the lack of legal representation for purdahnashins, women who were forbidden to interact with the outside male world. Living in Bombay in 1921 at the opening of The Widows of Malabar Hill, the character of Perveen is inspired by Cornelia Sorabji, the first female graduate of Bombay University, the first woman to study law at Oxford University, and the first woman to practice law in India.

She previously wrote a mystery series about a salaryman’s wife in Japan and historical fiction set in India, including the mystery novella Outnumbered at Oxford, which introduced Perveen to the literary world. It is a series debut, but not Massey’s first novel. Sujata Massey’s The Widows of Malabar Hill is one such aggregate: traditional mystery, domestic fiction, historical novel, and even legal thriller, since the main character, Perveen Mistry, is one of India’s pioneering female lawyers. Subgenres overlap, and because of this a single book can find itself in more than one section in a bookshop. This hybrid approach in Crombie’s books is becoming more of a norm in mysteries - even in hard-boiled stories.

It also made the classic tale from Agatha Christie feel emotionally bare-bones in comparison. This set an expectation: that a mystery dovetails with domestic fiction (in all its various forms). She loves Crombie’s popular police procedurals, in which the protagonists’ personal lives are as integral to the plot as tracking down the murderer. Granted, she was a newbie to the mystery genre, having just come to it through Deborah Crombie. WHEN THE STAR-STUDDED REMAKE of Murder on the Orient Express came out last year, my mom decided to read the book.

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