Detective Aunty (publication day May 6, 2025) by Uzma Jalaluddin is a satisfying cozy mystery featuring the widowed Kausar Khan, who is called back to Toronto, from her home in North Bay, Ontario, by her adult daughter who is a suspect in a murder.
Kausar and her late husband, Hassan, had fled Toronto fifteen years before, when Kausar was grieving the death of her youngest child, Ali, and couldn’t bear being there without him. Over time, Kausar emerged from her depression, but never really visited Toronto; her daughter Sana brought her granddaughters to visit occasionally to North Bay. One day. Sana calls her unexpectedly to come to Toronto, because the landlord of the shopping mall where Sana runs a clothing shop has been found murdered in her shop with a dagger taken from one of her displays, and Sana needs help with running the household for her two daughters.
We find out quickly that Kausar has always noticed things and put things together that others don’t see, helping solve mysteries large and small. And now, at her age, no one notices a nosy aunty asking questions. Though Sana doesn’t want that kind of help, Kausar knows that she can figure this murder out; her daughter can’t have done it.
Though being back in Toronto brings up memories she’d rather not revisit, she realizes that things are seriously wrong in her daughter’s house; Sana and her husband are barely speaking and her teenage granddaughter is hiding something.
With her best friend from North Bay, May, egging her on, and her former best friend, Fatima, helping, and the handsome divorced lawyer who has been a long-respected friend, Nasir, supporting and admiring her, Kausar begins her investigation and re-entry into the community she left behind years ago.
While the author has filled the book with South Asian and Muslim culture and descriptions, along with contemporary Canadian life, Kausar begins to find out that many people hated the murdered man and had reason to want him dead, including some in his own family. So why was her daughter the primary suspect?
It’s twisty and satisfying–I’m looking forward to more from Uzma Jalaluddin! And it was weight-neutral, if a bit fat-positive–when describing the handsome Nasir, he’s described as having been a slim man who has put on some weight, which “suits him.”
Reading While Fat 