Death in the Air

I have learned of books through many ways: word-of-mouth from friends, YouTube recommendations, ads in Barnes and Noble, ads on airplanes, Reddit comments, reading random articles that aren’t even about books and so on. One way I hadn’t learned of a book before was from watching a game show. That changed with this book, which I learned about because its author Ram Murali, was on Jeopardy!. He mentioned he was a writer and I liked him on the show, so I ordered the book.

The back part of the cover jacket says that this is Murali’s first novel and you can tell. He clearly has a lot of really interesting ideas but I don’t think they’re expressed in the best or most interesting way. One of the first rules of writing is ‘show, don’t tell’ and there is so much telling in this book, to the point that it detracts from my enjoyment of the story. This characteristic of Murali’s writing unfortunately bleeds into the characters as well, leading many of the supporting ones to be one-note caricatures.

With that said, I did enjoy parts of Death in the Air. The mystery itself is quite interesting and you can tell that Murali is a fan of the classics like the works of Agatha Christie in the way he drops clues. I will also give him credit for writing a really convoluted plot that does in fact make sense at the end. Murali is capable of writing a strong plot, and in a mystery novel that’s extremely important.

I will also say that it’s possible that I’m just missing things about this book. It primarily takes place in India and many issues specific to Indian culture are discussed throughout. I am not remotely familiar with many of the topics Murali talks about here and it’s likely that I would have enjoyed the book if I knew more about what Murali was talking about.

So what do you get when you have a mystery book with ok characters but an intriguing plot? You get a pretty ok whodunnit. I can’t say that I would recommend this to anyone looking for something new to read, but I do think fans of this genre will find something to like here.