HOW TO COMMIT A POSTCOLONIAL MURDER

A coming-of-age story about an Indian American girl struggling to figure out many things about herself, such as whether she and her sister should kill a relative.

It’s the summer of 1986, dead solid center in the middle of the Reagan decade, and sisters Georgette Ayyar and Agatha Krishna Creel are trying to make the best they can of awkward pre-adolescence in the oil town of Marley, Wyoming. They are daughters of Indian parents, Girl Scouts, Catholic school students, and named after their mother’s favorite authors—Heyer and Christie, respectively. “We were named after proper white ladies, even if we ourselves were never proper anything,” Georgie recalls. They are taken aback when their placid lives are disrupted by the arrival from India of their mother’s brother, Vinny, his wife, Devi, and their son, Narayan, who are all moving into their Cottonwood Cross home to stay. “Vinny Uncle made us shadow people,” Georgie says. And it is for the reason of feeling somehow split in two (“like freeze tag,” Georgie argues) that she and Agatha decide that Vinny Uncle must die. Their method: sneaking small amounts of antifreeze into his drinks. “Bright Mountain Dew in big cups,” Georgie recounts. “It was surprisingly easy to make him sick.” As her uncle gets gradually sicker, Georgie attends summer camp, watches the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, takes part in the local county fair and Fashion Revue, and waits for something to happen. Along the way, the narrative takes sardonic divergences, mostly in the form of multiple-choice romance questionnaires like the kind found in magazines. Examples: “How Do You Know If You’re Ready To Have a Sexual Relationship?”; “Is He Bad for You?” and, even, “Do You Have What It Takes To Kill?” Which is something Georgie finds herself asking, even as she and her sister are carrying out this inexplicable mission, for which they blame, among other things, British colonialism. Though framed like a funny, ferociously allusive grown-up version of a YA whodunit, McConigley’s debut novel carries deeper, knottier mysteries than the curious crime at its center.

Wittily observant and achingly tender.