Kaveri Murthy has recently joined her doctor husband, Ramu, in Bangalore in 1921 India. And while Kaveri is happy with her new husband, she's chafing a bit under the watchful eye of her new mother-in-law and her expectations of what a "good" wife should be. Kaveri is smart and has dreams of continuing her education, but knows that much will depend on what her husband may allow. When Kaveri witnesses strange interactions at the club and a murder occurs directly after? Kaveri is determined to investigate. She uses her intelligence and knowledge of science to find clues and she uses charm to convince her husband and the detective assigned to the case to let her.
Though the mystery itself is a bit thin and I guessed the culprit early on, Nagendra's richly-detailed setting and her use of colonial history really worked for me and had me doing a bit of a deep dive into this tumultuous time in India when I was done reading. I'll be putting book two in the series, Murder Under a Red Moon, on my tbr list.