Detective Aunty

I was really looking forward to reading Uzma Jalaluddin's novel Detective Aunty (#1,349) a mystery set in Toronto.  It has great cover art.  Unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, that's the best thing about it.  I quit reading it after a hundred pages, and the only reason I got that far was that I was stuck waiting in a doctor's office with no other reading material on hand.

Kausar Khan is the aunty in the title, an older woman who never recovered from the death of her youngest son many years ago.  She and her husband moved to a remote northern Canadian former military base leaving everything that reminded her of her son behind her - the rest of her family, friends, and mosque.  When her daughter calls and asks for her help, she comes back to Toronto to find that nothing is as it seems.  A man has been murdered in her daughter's shop in a rundown plaza, and Sana is the chief suspect in the murder.  The more she pokes, the more Kausar thinks they may be right, but she will do her utmost to protect her family.

Kausar herself is so self-centered, it's hard to have much sympathy for her as she moans about how difficult her life has been.  It's fine to ignore everyone else who might have suffered losses of their own as long as she hoards her own grief.  

Besides, I found the assumption that the reader who is not Muslim, nor a South Asian living in Toronto would be familiar with the terms used in the book without enough context to explain them made for difficult reading.  Since I couldn't care about the characters, I gave up.  Every book has its reader.  For Detective Aunty that's not me.