While balancing her career, for example, Perveen is also enjoying her friendship with Alice Hobson-Jones, a British socialite who just moved to India and attended Oxford with Perveen. Each path unfolds well with the murder being solved and Perveen moving beyond her marriage.Īnother interesting aspect is learning about 1920s India. The chapters go back and forth with the past and present, comparing and contrasting Perveen’s situation with her husband to the widows’ situation of living after their husband’s death. Shrouded by the murder mystery is Perveen’s past with a troubled marriage. Once she turns around to fetch it, she finds Mukri dead from a stab wound. She leaves the compound on Malabar Hill only to realize her briefcase is missing.

She’s learned the widows - Sakina, Razia, and Mumtaz - had conflicting assumptions about their inheritances. After talking to the three widows and befriending their children, Perveen gets a bad vibe from executor Faisal Mukri. So when a wealthy client’s will comes on her desk with his three widows giving their inheritance to an all-boys school yet to be built, she questions the widows’ decision as well as the man left to be the executor of the will. Though she’s not allowed to argue in court, she works on contracts. Perveen Mistry again is the only female solicitor in India, working for her father’s law firm in Bombay. “The Widows of Malabar Hill” by Sujata Massey is an interesting historical fiction novel with a murder mystery twist that gets India’s first female lawyer in a host of adventures.

The widows of malabar hill review