Okay, somebody please release blood-coloured smoke from the high chimney of Homicide House, for we, at last, seem to have found someone who fits the bill. For too long, people have wondered why we have failed to produce a Ruth Rendell, a P.D. James or an Ian Rankin. While it’s too early to saddle Kalpana Swaminathan with such comparisons, The Page 3 Murders is far superior to any murder mystery/policier to come out of India; and in another galaxy compared to the Bombay police novels written by ignorant Inglishmen.
Page 3 is subtitled A Lalli Mystery after the eponymous heroine-aunty, one tough, retired-but-not-quite-retired top cop who lives and hunts in Bombay. The narrator-Watson is Lalli’s ‘niece’—her friends’ daughter who moves in to live with her after boyfriend-meltdown, and she remains in the first person and nameless throughout. Besides this homage to both Conan Doyle and Len Deighton, there are other dutiful but elegant salaams to crime-novel masters, here an Agatha, there a Simenon, and then again a Chandler, but all this is the "faint bickering of spice" against which the narrative "defends its smoky flavour"—as a tongue-in-cheek description of a baingan bharta goes in the book.
The Racism Towards Anglo-Indians In English Literature 
The Custard Apple’s Seed 
