SHE STOOPS TO KILL (FREE DELIVERY)
In Mitra Phukan's story that opens this edge-of-the-seat anthology, She Stoops to Kill: Stories of Crime and Passion, a singing diva chokes to death onstage. The weapon is a poisoned paan--but who would want her dead? And Pratyaksha follows Mitra's entrée with the murder of an equally glamorous victim--air hostess Ginny Kalra. Bulbul Sharma, in Murder in the Wedding Season, creates a cosy setting for a wedding in Shimla; but the guests include a politician and a timorous widow whose past will disrupt the party in ways no one had imagined. And in Uddipana Goswami's Beloved of Flowers, a folktale about a girl reborn as a lotus leads young Dino to the truth behind a mysterious disappearance. Manjula Padmanabhan's Serial Killer brilliantly explores what it is like to be a perfectly normal person; except that you enjoy the act of murder. While Janice Pariat's delicately nuanced The Nurse shows us another side of death altogether. In the penultimate story by Venita Coelho, Sister, a vigilante eunuch, helps the police solve a gruesome killing in a city slum. And Paro Anand brings the collection to a grand finale with a story that begins with lust and ends with a murder--or two--that may or may not have happened.