Bombay Ice: A Novel

What happens when the glitzy world of moviemaking Bombay meets the gritty conventions of film noir? With luck, something like this dazzlingly ambitious novel from Canadian journalist Leslie Forbes. "I haven't seen the eunuch in almost four weeks. Ignore what I wrote you before. No need to come here and rescue me," Miranda Sharma writes her sister from Bombay, in a disconcertingly "schizophrenic" postcard that sends Rosalind Bengal across continents and deep into a world where nothing is what it seems. Part Scottish, part Indian, Roz is a crime journalist who can't help following a good lead when it appears, especially when her sister's welfare is at stake. Miranda recently married one of the Indian film industry's most prominent directors, Prosper Sharma, a man who's spent 20 years working on a movie version of The Tempest and who is rumored to have murdered his first wife. After her postcard, four hijra--eunuchs or transvestites--are found drowned in an eight week period, one of them with alleged connections to the film industry. Coincidence or not, Roz feels compelled to investigate.

What follows is a most unusual thriller, and not just by virtue of its setting. Crackling with wordplay and allusion, and set against a city that resembles nothing so much as a stage set under construction, the hyper-literate Bombay Ice sports influences ranging from Shakespeare to Sunset Boulevard, chaos theory to Raymond Chandler. In between meditations on alchemy, entropy, and the science of weather, Forbes constructs an intricate story charged with all the tension of the coming monsoon. The result is never less than interesting, even when, as occasionally happens, the book's intellectual concerns threaten to overpower its plot.