A delightful discovery
Oct. 8th, 2018 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricI'm currently really enjoying Sujata Massey's 'The Widows of Malabar Hill'. It's very good historical fiction, and longer and more complex than I'd expected - I wasn't expecting cosy, exactly, but something comparable to the Phryne Fisher books. Massey's offering a mystery of comparable tenor, but a more complex and confronting character background for her MC.
I noticed today that the metatext says she's written books set in Japan, as well as India, so I thought I'd look her up online. Lo and behold, she's the author of one of the few crime novels I voluntarily read and thoroughly enjoyed in high school - 'The Flower Master', a murder mystery featuring an antiques dealer and an ikebana school. I'd forgotten most of the details of the book, save that it was set in Japan and had a mixed-race Japanese-American woman detective. I just have the memory of the reading experience. As I've been reading more crime lately I keep thinking I should look it up again, but how on earth do you find something you read over a decade ago, and can only remember 'it's set in Japan and there's a scene where she gets a bikini wax and the beautician is freaked out because, due to her mixed heritage, she has more hair than expected'.
I read The Flower Master before 'buying books online' was really a thing; I think I picked it up on a deep discount table, isolated from any other books by the author. It looks like Massey had a five year hiatus between books, too, so there wasn't anything bumping her to internet attention between 2008 and 2013, by which time I had almost entirely forgotten having read The Flower Master.
In short, I am EXCITE. I'm also delighted to find her website has a collection of companion recipes to go with each series of books!
I noticed today that the metatext says she's written books set in Japan, as well as India, so I thought I'd look her up online. Lo and behold, she's the author of one of the few crime novels I voluntarily read and thoroughly enjoyed in high school - 'The Flower Master', a murder mystery featuring an antiques dealer and an ikebana school. I'd forgotten most of the details of the book, save that it was set in Japan and had a mixed-race Japanese-American woman detective. I just have the memory of the reading experience. As I've been reading more crime lately I keep thinking I should look it up again, but how on earth do you find something you read over a decade ago, and can only remember 'it's set in Japan and there's a scene where she gets a bikini wax and the beautician is freaked out because, due to her mixed heritage, she has more hair than expected'.
I read The Flower Master before 'buying books online' was really a thing; I think I picked it up on a deep discount table, isolated from any other books by the author. It looks like Massey had a five year hiatus between books, too, so there wasn't anything bumping her to internet attention between 2008 and 2013, by which time I had almost entirely forgotten having read The Flower Master.
In short, I am EXCITE. I'm also delighted to find her website has a collection of companion recipes to go with each series of books!