Berkley
Published February 10, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Siriwatha Perera, who immigrated to New York City with her Sri Lankan family as a child, drives a taxi through the canyons of Manhattan late at night. She passes the time listening to true crime podcasts as she picks up passengers and tries to get them to their destinations safely. Generally she succeeds, until one night she has a fare that takes her across the city to JFK airport. He’s an easy passenger who stresses he needs to arrive on time before falling deeply asleep in the backseat. Unfortunately, he doesn’t wake up when they arrive, thanks to the knife stuck in his chest.
It seems to the authorities that Siri, as she’s known for short, must be the killer, even if her motive is elusive. Who else could kill a man riding in a locked taxi? Fortunately, she has a public defender on her side who vigorously takes up her cause. Amaya Fernando had met Siri when hailing a ride outside the criminal court where she’d been defending a client and was delighted to meet another Sri Lankan immigrant. Now she has to defend Siri in her first homicide case, and things look especially grim when tests find Siri’s DNA on the knife that she swears she never touched. Trying to establish Siri’s innocence, the pair investigate the dead man’s past involvement in a cult-like environmental movement and the business where he worked, turning up a tangled web of motives and opportunities.
Siri and Amaya make for an interesting pair, and their travels through the boroughs of New York City are vividly rendered as we learn more about Siri, her family, their immigrant community, and the reasons she is driving a taxi rather than going to law school, as she had hoped. The plot is influenced by her understandable distrust of police, the unevenness of justice system, and the difficulty of defending yourself when you aren’t sure how you’re going to pay the bills. But all of these issues are folded into the story with Siri’s chirpy, optimistic humor and a touch of spice.
Readers will enjoy riding along in this entertaining debut as they strive to solve a locked-room mystery that just happens to take place in a New York cab.