Quiet in Her Bones
Nalini Singh
★★★★★ 1/5
Fiction; Murder Mystery
Run…before you are tempted in any way to pick this book up
I hate to trash a book since every creative act is a labor of love made with intent to please. But I also value straight talk. So I have to excoriate Nalini Singh’s Quiet In Her Bones: this is the worst book I have read in a long time.
The narrator of Nalini Singh’s Quiet in Her Bones, a writer named Aarav, mentions how a phrase he uses would have immediately been flagged by his editor as a ‘cliche’. If only Ms. Singh’s editor had been savvy enough to realize this entire book is a cliche of the murder mystery genre, I and other readers would have been spared the wasted time. Or if only NPR reviewers whose best of 2021 list (or this one here) led me to this book, had better taste!
Sadly, there is nothing that redeems this book: not plot (cliched), not characters (all one dimensional), not writing (uninspired) and definitely not the facepalm worthy climax.
Psychological Thriller gone wrong:
Ms. Singh, ostensibly wanted this to read as a psychological thriller—narrated by the victim’s son, often unreliably, as he recovers from brain damage, from an accident whose details are scant, while trying to uncover the murderer. The result is instead something that might have had a better chance at entertaining had it been a parody rather than taking itself so seriously.
Nina Rai, a wealthy socialite of Indian origin, living in New Zealand went missing one night a decade ago. Her body, or rather the skeletal remains, have now turned up. Her son Aarav, who is also the narrator vows to find her killer and avenge her death.
As is par for the course for the genre, there are plenty of suspects: all of the wealthy residents of the Cul-De-Sac where Nina lived. To keep the reader guessing, Ms. Singh invents reason after reason why anyone of them could be the killer: most of them having to do with infidelities of these neighbors: Nina having had affairs with them or a witness to their affairs. 🙄
The writing is fast paced and linear but grows tiresome with the same plot red herrings rehashed page after page until we come to the onerous finale when lo and behold we discover it is one of the cast of the Cul-De-Sac whodunit!!!
Save yourselves
So why did I not abandon this book mid-way? It’s not because I’ve fallen for the sunk cost fallacy—I’ve given up on many a book when I’ve realized it’s not my cup of tea. When someone is found murdered on the very first page, there’s this human urge, which Ms. Singh cleverly banks on, to want to know what happened. I clearly succumbed to it and labored through to the end. It’s too late for me. But you can still save yourself. It’s too bad my last book of 2021 was a turkey. I guess it’s the law of averages at play after my last book was the simply superb The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. The lesson here is that I’m going to have to be more careful with NPR’s suggestions. If you are in the mood for mystery I recommend Alex Michaelides’ superb The Silent Patient or Lucy Foley’s The Guest List.
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