THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE, January 2021
- Recommended by The New York Times - 22 Jan 2021
- Named among the best traditional mysteries of 2020 by CrimeReads.
For fans of Knives Out, a book that embodies all the things we love about Agatha Christie―a haunted manor house, estranged relatives a will, and a murder― set in modern-day India, and the first in a series from author RV Raman.
Aging and wheelchair-bound patriarch Bhaskar Fernandez has finally reclaimed his family property after a bitter legal battle, and now wants to reunite his aggrieved relatives. So, he invites them to remote Greybrooke Manor in the misty Nilgiris ―a mansion that has played host to several sudden deaths; a colonial edifice that stands alone in a valley that is said to be haunted by the ghost of an Englishman. But Bhaskar has other, more practical problems to deal with.
He knows that his family is waiting for him to die to regain the family fortune, and to safeguard himself against violence during the house party, he writes two conflicting wills. Which one of them comes into force depends on how he dies.
Into this tinderbox, he brings Harith Athreya, a seasoned investigator. When a landslide occurs, temporarily isolating them all at the mansion, and resulting in a murder, Athreya finds that murder is not the only thing the mist conceals.
A WILL TO KILL is the first Harith Athreya mystery.
"... the influence of Agatha Christie on the author's writing is unmissable. Enjoy a nostalgic trip back to your teenage years when crisp crime thrillers kept us awake for long nights." - The Telegraph
"The influence of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr on the narrative is compelling ... The narrative style also shows influences of author Ngaio Marsh. Like Marsh, Raman's prose is what really makes him stand out. It is subtle, clear, ironic, but always elegant and peppered with witty liners; his characters sharply, sometimes hilariously, drawn." - Orissa Post
"Red herrings galore, there is never a dull moment in the book. The writing is crisp and self-assured and the author's confidence shows in the way the story unfolds and in the way the motives and secrets of characters are revealed. The cliffhanger chapter-ends and solutions have readers slapping their foreheads. The denouement is crisp and impactful and doesn't draw out over pages." - Orissa Post
