A review by hbcbray
A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee

3.0

Whodunnits are successful primarily on the strength of their sleuth and the inventiveness of the crime. The reverse is also true.

So I found it hard to love this first of a series, where the detective we must hang our hat on is floundering, by turns decisive and self-excoriating, and generally ambiguous character. The crime, simultaneously, is uninventive - a stabbing in an alley where the deceased 'shouldn't' be - and the dead man hardly a person at all in the narrative.

One can hope that the following novels are more gripping, the characters more clear, but I'm not interested enough to find out.