books you may love: Midnight at Malabar House by Vaseem Khan, and A Divided Loyalty by Charles Todd

After having read Books 2 and 3 of the Malabar House series featuring newly independent India's first female police officer, Inspector Persis Wadia, I managed to read the first book in the series: Midnight at Malabar House!

It was every bit as intriguing and rich with details of 1950s India as the other books in the series, and I absolutely loved reading it.

The author, Vaseem Khan, touches on many sensitive topics in India's independence history and weaves them into the tale with much grace and respect. Wadia's first interactions with love interest, Scotland Yard criminalist, Archie Blackfinch, are often quite hilarious and made me laugh out loud.

I hope Khan has a Book 4 up his sleeve and I can't wait for that to come out soon!

And then I returned to Charles Todd, whose Inspector Ian Rutledge mysteries have become very comforting reads for me. Any time I feel low, all I need to do is pick up a Charles Todd book and life goes back to being blissful all over again.

A Divided Loyalty is rather a different kind of mystery in which Rutledge is tasked with investigating a case that another officer has already looked into in great detail and declared closed without having been able to find the culprit.

It is an impossible mystery that Rutledge is asked to investigate, but under his persistent search, the thread begins to unravel.

I won't say much more about the book other than to note that it is such an amazing thing to be able to find authors and characters we can return to again and again.

Books have given me so much: friendship, loyalty, steadfast companionship, insight into human behaviour, empathy, and the ability to travel back and forth in time and across the world no matter where I am!

I can only hope my books offer readers the same joy too.