Amin Ahmed, who teaches at Duke University, has written a suspenseful and Succession-like debut novel that’s a rollercoaster ride until the end.
In A Killer in the Family (Henry Holt), the suspense ratchets as the story begins, in flashback and told alternately from the perspective of its two lead characters—Ali and Farhan, his wife Maryam’s older sister. Farhan is missing in the beginning, and the discovery of a dismembered heart revives fears that a serial killer called the Jackson Heights Killer (JHK), last heard of some years ago, is back in action. The women who number among his victims are young Asian girls from the Jackson Heights area in Queens, New York.
Then, shifting two years back, the novel takes us to a wedding in June 2014. In Mumbai, Ali is a sort of playboy and a wedding photographer whose family suddenly receives a marriage proposal from the wealthy Khan family. Both families are Ismailis and the wedding is to be a nice and artfully arranged matter. Ali’s fiancée, Maryam, is a psychiatrist in a leading hospital. Moreover, Ali’s family business is nothing compared to the sprawling real-estate empire (Tiger Corp.) established by Abbas Khan. The discrepancies in background, finances, and career choices don’t bother Ali in the beginning. Instead, it is the sudden shifting moods, and the unpredictability he soon senses among various members of his wife’s family, that arouses his discomfort—and soon, his suspicions.
Things are arranged with clockwork efficiency, unsparing of every luxury, and yet there’s his father- in-law’s savage outburst, his sister-in-law’s no-holds barred sensuousness, Maryam’s preternatural ice-cool demeanor, the ever-watchful factotum Bade Mian, and the other male honchos in the firm—Kyle, Hamza, and Big Mike—all suave and loyal to the boss, Abbas Khan. But are they really? Ali soon realizes no one is really who they are, and relationships are malleable and manipulable. As he tries to figure out the mystery of this family he has married into, Ali is soon dragged into another: finding JHK, whom Farhan (and this isn’t a spoiler) is certain she has seen.
The novel, then, is nicely set up and becomes quite a page-turner. The mercurial and volatile nature of almost everyone—except for Coco, who is determined to be Buddhist—makes the novel seem like a print version of the television series Succession, with a serial killer lurking around. Its unpredictability is disconcerting, or maybe it depends on the reader. Once you figure out that the rug will be pulled from under your feet on almost every page, and get used to the wild mood swings, pace, and temperament—and accept that Maryam on occasion is Farhan-like (in her exuberance) and vice versa— reading the novel will be like being on a rollercoaster.
The ride gets wilder when you suspect that Ali can be unreliable as well. This lets in a lot of red herrings: who the real JHK is, or the strange relationship between Abbas Khan and his daughters, or the reason behind Farhan’s estrangement. It’s all intricate and complicated, and perhaps this is just how super-rich families are. We do get a lot of what they wear and how they live: “The three women clad in . . . those cork- soled espadrilles that signify high-end leisure. Abbas Khan wore a blue-and-white pinstriped seersucker suit, like a banker out of Gatsby.”
Ali and Maryam are honeymooning in Seville, in a house that is “summer palace of a duke from Madrid, built in the Arab style—tile roof, white stucco walls, wrought-iron balconies—the rooms arranged around a central courtyard in which a fountain plashed musically.” In their New York apartment, furnished by an art adviser, Ali notes there were “signed prints of Picasso and Matisse, a large abstract canvas by Miro, and a genuine Rothko. Along one hallway hung original Atget silver albumen pictographs of fin de siècle Paris.” A description of this apartment takes up three paragraphs. About rules, Maryam suggests, “there’s always wiggle room,” for the rich and entitled.
These recitations of in-your-face luxury are welcome distractions, especially when you know that somewhere in the spacious grounds outside, a body lies buried, that everyone is not really who they are— and yes, the killer could be anyone in the family, even someone invisible, indispensable, and trusted.
New Jersey-based Anuradha Kumar is a prolific essayist, novelist, and historian.