This book really needs its subtitle: Murder in the Making. That should have been the title, but I hate when an author republishes a book with a new title, and I buy it, and it turns out I’ve already bought it and read it!
It’s an unusual story. Gil Tillier is called to a bloody crime scene. Ample forensic evidence points in an obvious direction, but Tillier’s instinct tells him that a strange, frightened teenage girl on the sidelines knows something that would break the case wide open. In fact, she has stumbled on a secret that she cannot bring herself to share–and the revelation of that secret is the twist of the book–“certainly not what one might expect,” according to one reader.
“Mystery writing at its best . . . a complex story, mixing threads of bioethics, psychology, basic human needs and urges, on a background of the power games often played in the worlds of academia, law enforcement and love relationships.” –reader review
I particularly enjoyed writing the prologue. I wanted something like the beginning of The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece). This story calls for atmosphere! It starts like this:
PROLOGUE
Bangalore, 1997
Asa Darbey slipped into the Tiger Raj Hotel ahead of a late afternoon rain shower. Obese and heavily perspiring, he lumbered unseen up the back stairs from the garden, hauling a large, round basket that looked as though it might belong to a snake charmer.
His room was unbearably hot and stuffy after being shut up all day in his absence. Locking the door behind him, Darbey dropped the basket in the middle of the room with a thump. It rocked and bulged, then became still.
Wheezing, Darbey struggled out of his rumpled linen suit jacket and tossed it on the bed. A scientist and academic, he was unused to such drastic action as he’d taken that day. He flung wide the pair of casement doors that opened onto a narrow balcony. Cool, wet air filled the room, smelling of thunder and tuberose, ripe earth, and rot. A wild monkey-gang hooted in a copper pod tree.
The basket rocked again and nearly toppled. Darbey looked at it, thick lips pursed, until exultation rumbled up from inside his vast girth. Success! Darbey pulled off his wire-rimmed spectacles and mopped his face with his sleeve. No one would ever know what he had done—except a lowly lab assistant who’d been well paid and only too glad to disappear.
He unlooped the latch on the basket’s lid and flicked aside the top. Out popped a small monkey, a common Macaque like the wild monkeys in the treetops. The monkey leapt onto a table and crouched there, blinking at the unfamiliar surroundings.
Darbey snatched up his jacket and wrapped it around his right hand. Gingerly—he was not a man who loved animals—he offered his protected hand to the monkey while reaching with his left for the tin ID tag stapled to the monkey’s ear. One decisive yank, a screech, and the monkey skittered to the far side of the room. Darbey tossed aside the tag and wiped his left hand on his pants.
Shielding himself with the jacketed arm, the fat man lurched toward the wary creature. It darted past him, out the open doors, and perched on the balcony rail. Rain dripped from the branches of the copper pod, and faint thunder sounded in the distance. The wild monkeys whooped and chattered as a large male swung down for a closer look. The little silver-brown Macaque clutched its bloody ear and hesitated, caught between unaccustomed freedom and the untrustworthy man.
Darbey banged the balcony doors shut and grunted. The animal could fend for itself. A monkey looking like every other monkey in Bangalore, it would never be found. Without the living proof of what she had accomplished, the Indian woman scientist would be denounced as a fraud. Darbey rubbed his hands together, savoring a moment of anticipation before rummaging inside the basket for a sheaf of papers and a small cotton drawstring bag. He riffled through the papers, sniffed the bag. He would not only replicate the Indian woman’s work; he would take it to the next level.
The one person in the world who could blow the whistle on him, the colleague who had come to Bangalore with him, that old stick Paul Nehren, would suspect foul play. But Nehren was in no position to accuse him. Darbey swelled with confidence that he would soon have everything he hungered for. Riches, yes, and fame, but more than that, he would be known as the greatest scientist who ever lived.
Elizabeth Buhmann 