Customer Reviews

Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder (Inspector Singh Investigates 1)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I was not sure what to make of the vastly opposing reviews here on amazon when I ordered this book. After reading it, I understand the negative ones and I have to wonder if those leaving 5 star reviews actually read the book.

The biggest mystery of all about this book is how on Earth it actually got published in this condition...

That said - I LIKED the book. Talk about conflicted feelings.

The good things about this book: a very interesting plot and characters that I really liked. Flint is obviously a brilliant and creative author. The story was intriguing [which was the ONLY thing that kept me reading].

The bad things about this book: This was the worst actual writing that I've ever seen in a published book. This book reads like a bad rough draft that nobody ever got around to proof reading or revising. The book is hard to follow - the author does things like change viewpoints mid paragraph and jump around amongst different characters in a way that feels positively frantic. Poor use of description and pronouns make much of the writing hard to even decipher. Poor grammar and extremely poor sentence structure plague the book throughout. Mammoth, meandering descriptions and modifiers go on and on and on in sentences that never end. Bad analogies and terrible cliches run rampant through the novel.

For example, read this sentence that I chose at random from a thousand other bad examples in this book: "A harassed woman, sauteing vegetables in a big pot of boiling water and then deftly flicking them onto a row of plates while another worker squirted soy sauce and a spoonful of fried garlic on each, said, 'She no speak Engris one!' "

So....you see the problem? [Aside from the fact that what she's describing is not sauteing vegetables but blanching them - sauteing involves the use of oil, but I digress..] What does this sentence even mean? Who spoke to us? The harassed woman at the beginning of the sentence or the other worker who squirts the soy sauce? The writing is just so horribly unclear and awkward like this throughout the book. It was painful to wade through.

The ambiguous use of pronouns really got to me - FREQUENTLY in a long, confusing passage describing a scene between two or more men or women, some important action would happen and the author would write "she [or he] did such and such" and I would seriously have no idea which of the two or three or more people involved did the action. Ahhhhhh!

Whoever was the editor of this book should seriously investigate another career in a very different field. I am completely mystified as to how this book ever made it into print in this condition - it is nuts.

That said, it was a heck of a plot and the characters were great. I think the author is interesting and talented - she just needed a lot more help from a good editor and some basic help on grammar and sentence structure.

I liked the storyline so much that I actually just bought the second in this series - and I can't beleive I've done it because I was pulling my hair in frustration during parts of trying to read this first one - but I'm hoping the writing improved. I think the author shows a lot of promise and with a good editor she could write some great fiction.

Kudos to the author who was brave enough to expose ugly Malaysia, even its uglier inhabitants. Hold on to your seats whilst you are brought on a roller coaster ride of murder, bribery, adultery, police corruption (and idiocy amongst others), oppression of an indigenous tribe, the rape of the jungle of Borneo, the effects of religious diversity, all amidst the sweltering heat of the concrete jungle accompanied by flood, traffic jams and pollution. Quite a lot to swallow, eh?

Inspector Singh, an obviously bumbling (but not endearing the least bit) fool doesn't seem to do much investigating as the title suggests. He's constantly bothered by the heat ('tis a wonder why being Singaporean and all) and seems merely to act as a conduit for the author to thumb her nose to all things Malaysian. On the side, I would advise the author to have a little chat with a 'Chinese towkay' so that she'll avoid butchering the 'Chinese towkay' English as she did here.

All in all, I found it a very amateur attempt (by a Cambridge law grad) at a detective novel. I'll keep my cash rather than attempt her 2nd and 3rd Inspector Singh book.

This has to be by far one of the WORST books I have ever read. The mystery itself is weak, the characters are boring and one-dimensional. The story itself is long, drawn out and convoluted. My advice -- skip it for sure! Not worth the time.

Cathy of the Kittling:Books blog has been writing about Inspector Singh books for a while now and her reviews were so funny I just had to try one. I borrowed this one from the library. It turns out Cathy is right; I'm going to look for the rest of the series now.

Inspector Singh is a police detective in Singapore. For this case he has been sent to Kuala Lumpur to investigate the case of a former model from Singapore who has been accused of killing her ex-husband. Since Singh is obese and unused to Kuala Lumpur, he sweats, gets his shiny shoes dusty, unwillingly visits his gossipy sister, faces down the opposition of the local police force to his intrusion, and resents his minder.

The victim, Alan Lee, was the president of a huge logging company which has been clear-cutting in Borneo and causing all kinds of violent trouble for the people and animals on that island. Lee was a wife beater, and cheated on his gorgeous wife frequently as he enjoyed his money and let his youngest brother run the company. The middle brother, Jasper, is an ecologist investigating his younger brother's misuse of power. Meanwhile, the victim's wife had divorced him but was in danger of losing her children because Alan Lee had converted to Islam before he died and the Islamic Court would probably rule against letting the children be raised by a non-Moslem woman.

Now all this is very serious stuff, but Singh is unconsciously hilarious. The contrast between him and the others on the case is, as author Shamini Flint writes, "Mohammad led the way, walking with long-limbed elegance. Shukor padded silently in his wake, Singh lumbered after them. A study in physical contrasts, they looked like a procession that was not just walking along a corridor but up the evolutionary chain as well."

Flint is a writer with a light touch but her characters are drawn swiftly and precisely. I also enjoyed the descriptions of Kuala Lumpur, especially when Singh got lost in the city. You think of a sharp detective as a man who can chase suspects, is an excellent shot, yet cerebral. Singh is anything but this kind of detective but he surely gets the job done. He's a great character and I liked this book very much.

I was so looking forward to this novel, based on all the positive reviews on Amazon. I also went ahead and bought all the three novels in the series!!!

However, I was sorely disappointed by this novel. The author's narrative is dissatisfying because of which I had difficulty in reading more than 3 to 5 pages at a time and it took me a few weeks to complete this novel as opposed to reading a novel in a couple of days.

The characters are one dimensional with inconsistent and inexplicable behavior pattern. The plot is not up to scratch with the climax flabbergasting by the letdown, with the title character having absolutely no role to play in resolving the murder. As another reviewer rightly said "the story just seemed to unfold without any active participation from this detective."

And I am still left with two more novels to be read!!!

The full title of the book includes the words "A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder" and murder is definitely outside of the norm as murders go.

Inspector Singh is something of an annoyance to his superiors and his comrades in the Singapore police. He is opinionated, stubborn, and somewhat disrespectful of authority (insofar as anyone can be disrespectful of authority in Singapore) so when it is learned that a woman from the city-state is accused of murder in Kuala Lumpur, it makes sense to send Singh to a place where he can annoy others for awhile.

The woman destined to be on death row is Chelsea Liew, a former model with one of the most recognizable faces in southeast Asia. She is accused of killing her husband, Alan Lee, a man no one was going to miss. Alan Lee was the director of the family timber business, a highly successful family enterprise that had made the family very wealthy. Alan and Chelsea had married in a highly publicized ceremony that had conferred the status of royalty on the couple. But, behind closed doors, Alan was guilty of spousal abuse, he was a philanderer, and he was involved in a number of nefarious business schemes that did nothing to enhance the name of Lee in Malay society.

When Chelsea decides to divorce Alan, she isn't prepared for the degree to which he will go to ensure that he gets sole custody of their sons. He converts to Islam and declares his children to be Muslims as well, guaranteeing that Chelsea will have no contact with them.

Alan dies at the hands of someone who knew him well enough to get past his bodyguards. After publicly swearing that she would kill him for taking her children, Chelsea is the immediate front runner in the "who killed Alan Lee" stakes but there are other contenders. Alan's older brother, Jasper, the heir to the business, has walked away from it to pursue his commitment to protect the ecology of the country and has watched his brother ignore the policies that the Lee family have in place to protect the forests which are the source of their wealth. The younger son, Kian Min, has plans to go further in expanding the family timber company no matter what the cost and the first item of business is to get rid of Alan. Chelsea insists that she is innocent but the police are convinced of her guilt and see no need to look further.

INSPECTOR SINGH INVESTIGATES is a story of marital disaster, family breakdown, greed, jealousy, misguided commitments, and shattered loyalty. The Lee family are starring in their own soap opera with Inspector Singh in the wings watching the drama, looking for the person who goes off script.

The book is a fast read and most of the violence is kept off the page. Unfortunately, the intriguing things about the locales, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, are also kept off the page. The story could take place in any major city in nearly any part of the world. There is nothing of the sense of place that is found in Cotterill's Laos, Qiu's Shanghai, or Hallinan's Bangkok. Malaysia is confined to the cover art.

That being said, I will probably read other books in the series as they become available.

I've always been a sucker for crime novels set in distant lands featuring atypical protagonists, so this debut by a Singaporean author featuring a Sikh police detective seemed right up my alley. With his rumpled dress, porcine appetites (and corresponding belly), and disdain for the scientific method, Inspector Singh is an affront to his superiors. As a result, they have a tendency to throw him on difficult cases that take him far away from them. In this first in a series, he's sent to Kuala Lumpur to ensure that a Singaporean citizen accused of murdering her very wealthy Malaysian Chinese husband, gets fairly retreated by the Malaysian justice system.

Upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur, Singh is assigned an local police assistant/minder, and sets about trying to make sense of what the local cops think is an open and shut case of an abused woman snapping and killing her husband. Singh's method is to get to know the life of the victim intimately, and from this basis, form a list of suspects. In this case, it quickly becomes apparent that the murdered timber tycoon had any number of potential enemies from both his personal and professional life. Once Singh has his cast of suspects, he then tries to push their buttons, keep them off-balance, and generally provoke them into giving themselves away.

It's an engaging enough debut, with some local color but not nearly enough for my taste. The exception is a very interesting subplot involving the wife possibly losing custody of her children due to the dead husband's alleged confession to Islam. The interplay between civil and sharia law in Malaysia is drawn out nicely though this issue. There's also a decent expose of the seamy side of the timber industry and environmental degradation in the developing world. Ultimately, though, the star of the show is Inspector Singh, as chews away at the murder in a manner both dogged yet sly, somewhat in the vein of the old TV detective Columbo. He's a fun character, and while the writing isn't scintillating, the plotting and setting are enough for me to check out his further adventures in A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul.

I like mysteries located in regions I know little about, so I looked forward to reading this novel. Sadly, it is both poorly written and poorly plotted. The mystery itself did not hold my attention. The character development was woeful. The writing was "okay" at best. So why the positive reviews on amazon? That is a mystery to me.

After a month in storage, the body of Alan Lee does not look good. Inspector Singh of the Singapore Police observes the corpse with interest, but his Malaysian assistant is clearly queasy. Singh remarks sympathetically, "You never forget the first."

Inspector Singh has been sent to Kuala Lumpur to look out for the interests of a Singapore citizen, Chelsea Liew, accused of killing her wealthy ex-husband Alan Lee. A wife-beater and philanderer who was fighting underhandedly for custody of the children, Alan Lee had given Chelsea good reason to shoot him.

But Singh quickly upsets the cut-and-dried case. Chelsea, a beautiful ex-model with a tigress-like love for her children, turns out to be only one of many possible suspects.

Singh is his own man with his own methods, and despite his many successes, is not beloved by his bosses. But the reader likes him at once. He's short, fat, hairy, sweaty and wears a Sikh turban. White sneakers complete his outfit, although they don't stay white long in the grime and pollution of Kuala Lumpur.

The plot is rich in interpersonal conflicts, and a compelling sub-theme is illegal logging in the rain forests (the Lee family owns a predatory timber company). But I found the setting even more engaging than the mystery. Throughout the story, the author contrasts squeaky-clean Singapore (where chewing gum is illegal) with the slap-dash seediness of Kuala Lumpur.

Despite the presence of some serious themes in the book, I'd characterize it as a light mystery. But light is sometimes just what's wanted. The thoughtful, disheveled Inspector Singh is a charmer, and I've ordered the next book in the series.

I had expectations for this book, and Inspector Singh, having completed detective, Vish Puri's novel. However, was disappointed. Though I enjoyed the background of Malaysia and Singapore, I feel Inspector Singh really did not contribute much to this investigation. What did he do??? The story just seemed to unfold without any active participation from this detective.
Also, what does the author have against Malaysia?