India, Feb. 6 -- In the quiet setting of Tamil Nadu's backwaters, a Malayalam-speaking IPS officer gets posted. With his newly wedded wife in tow, his story unfolds like a deceptively tepid premise made in the 1960s. Wasting no time, The Jasmine Murders opens with a chilling line: 'That's a head he's carrying." And from there, the novel sheds any veil of restraint, signalling that beneath the stillness of this little hamlet lies a history soaked in blood, silence and complicity. The protagonists, Jayan and Uma, navigate through cultural dissonance, language barriers and the unsettling undercurrents of an unfamiliar town. Spiralling into a fast-paced trail of burglaries and murders, the pleasure of the book lies not in uncovering what happened, but in how it happened as clues emerge obliquely, through silences, stolen glances, and confessional recollections. This is author Roopa Unnikrishnan's first foray into fiction, and her prose is eloquent, yet succinct and sharp. Binding it tight in a 229-pager, the events of the novel unfold over a window of 24 days between December 1 and December 24, 1964. Its finite pacing lends the story a claustrophobic urgency as if time itself is pressing in on the characters. While the book may present itself as a crime novel flirting with the whodunnit genre, its ambitions are broader. Beneath the investigation runs a layered feminist subtext that examines the power of the patriarchy and the sinister violence still inflicted upon women. Echoes of a country grappling with the aftershocks of colonisation, communal violence, and inherited rage frame the narrative. In The Jasmine Murders, justice is not clean, nor is the truth comforting. What remains instead is the jasmine-scented calm masking a history that refuses to stay buried. Title: The Jasmine Murders Author: Roopa Unnikrishnan Publisher: Aleph Book Company Price: Rs.799...