India, Feb. 22 -- How did you come to write this book on the assassination of Gauri Lankesh?

I've been coming to India to report for the New York Times Magazine for over a decade with a focus on south India. I'd increasingly been spending time in Bangalore with my family. We'd just spent a month there and left when I got the news that Gauri Lankesh had been assassinated.

I'd never met Gauri. I'd heard of her, and I knew many people who knew her, but it came as an enormous shock that she was murdered as it did for so many people in Bangalore, partly because it just didn't seem like such a thing was possible there. Bangalore has extremely low rates of gun crime. I had one police officer tell me that sometimes a full year goes by without a...