Harper Perennial
Published May 6, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Kausar Khan, an Indian-Canadian Muslim in her fifties, fled to the remote town of North Bay after her teenaged son was killed in an unsolved hit-and-run on the streets of their immigrant Toronto neighborhood. For many years she has refused to return to the city – until she receives a shocking phone call from her daughter, Sana. She needs her. There’s been a murder, and she is the prime suspect.
It shocks Kausar into action. She returns to the city that holds such painful memories to defend Sana from an investigation that has far too much evidence against her. The victim was her landlord: a bitter, unpopular man who made an enemy of every shop owner in his Golden Crescent shopping center. The weapon was a dagger on display in Sana’s upscale dress shop, her security camera had stopped working just before the murder, her fingerprints and DNA were found on the body, and her clothes were covered with his blood. It doesn’t look good.
Kausar has a talent for noticing things and has solved many small mysteries, the kind that might crop up in ordinary life. She’s determined to user her gift to find out who actually killed the landlord – but quickly learns Sana doesn’t want her to investigate. What she really wants is someone to handle things at home, particularly since her marriage seems to be falling apart. Kausar is disappointed, but not surprised; married at a young age to much older man she’d never met, she has spent her life in a traditional role of wife and mother. But now she’s a widow, and she must bring herself to defend her daughter, no matter what. After years of living a quiet, hidden existence, avoiding the ghosts of her past, she senses her life is about to begin a second act.
As she doggedly interviews neighbors and shopkeepers and probes the conflicted relationships of the victim’s family and her own, she pieces together clues like a jigsaw puzzle, trying combinations, finding which ones don’t fit, looking for a pattern. She’s aided by some old friends whom she hadn’t spoken to in years, and a newer one from North Bay who eagerly follows every turn of the plot, casting herself as Kausar’s Watson, offering advice and encouragement.
While the mystery follows the well-worn path of amateur sleuths who aren’t taken seriously by the authorities, using their wisdom rooted in their traditional feminine roles to solve crimes, Detective Aunty is enriched by the immigrant urban setting, where high housing prices are destabilizing prospects for young people and policing practices are often heavy-handed. In the face of rising crime and the threat of gentrification, the community has a resilience seasoned with diverse flavors. The story is also infused with Kausar’s Muslim faith and its daily rituals as well as aspects of Desi culture in Toronto.
After publishing several romance novels with similar cultural settings, Jalalludin has launched a mystery series that’s as comforting and spicy as the chai Kausar brews to meet her family’s challenges.