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.
There are moments when Swaminathan tries too hard and ends up with the badly bludgeoned corpse of a cliche. There are other points when it feels as if she’s overloaded the plot and devices, put in as many things as the long menu at the centre of the book. But anyone who can put together a ragout of Alexander Calder with a discreetly spicy dhrupad of Raag Jhinjoti, anyone who has the chutzpah to serve antique Rolls Royces and little lectures on interior decoration as side-dishes to the central classic: a weekend house party cut off by the elements oozing dead bodies, deserves the Bronze Bloodstain for First (and First-rate) Murder Mystery.
