📚 Fluky and Kafkaesque

Uzma Jalaluddin is the author of the Detective Aunty series. Book two, Moonlight Murder, is out this week from Harper Perennial. Below, she discusses the mystery novels that helped inspire her detective main character.

When I sat down in late 2022 to finally write my own mystery novel, after debuting as a romance writer, I knew I had my work cut out for me. Mystery readers are a discerning, suspicious lot, their eagle eyes always on the lookout for clues and red herrings. I should know; for most of my life, I was that reader. After a few failed attempts, I went back and re-read a few of my favourite mystery novels.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie: I first read this book as a teen, and I still remember my shock at the ending. This was the novel that made me look at mystery novels in a whole new light: a fun playground where an author could exercise their imagination, break rules, and bring readers along for the ride.

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz: This book—which is excellent on audio—is the first in Horowitz’s fantastic and very meta detective series, where the author himself plays the role of hapless Watson to the fictional detective Hawthorne. It’s great fun, and each book in the series is also an intricately plotted mystery.

Blackwater Falls by Ausma Zehanat Khan: Ausma is a good friend, someone who has spent many hours advising me when I decided to dive into crime fiction. The advice she gave me was sound, and based on a plethora of experience—she is the author of eight mysteries, across two series, including the gripping Blackwater Falls series—I highly recommend!

As a result of reading and enjoying some of the best that crime fiction has to offer, I wrote my first mystery novel, Detective Aunty, which was published in 2025, and the follow-up, Moonlight Murder, which was published in the U.S. on May 5, 2026.

The series follows Kausar Khan, a 50-something South Asian widow who lives in Toronto, and who is keen to launch her second act as an amateur detective, using her unique perspective and impressive powers of deduction to help her diverse community.