Sujata Massey


Sujata Massey is a British-American mystery writer and historical fiction novelist best known for her Rei Shimura mystery series. Her debut novel, The Salaryman's Wife, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel in 1997. In 2000, her novel The Flower Master, won the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel. In 2019, her novel The Widows of Malabar Hill won the Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Lefty Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel, and the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel.

Life

Massey was born in 1964 in Sussex, England to parents from India and Germany. She emigrated with her family to the United States at the age of 5 and grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota and Baltimore, Maryland, where she attended Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 1986.

Career

Massey worked as a features reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun. However, she is best known for her series featuring Rei Shimura, a Californian born to a Japanese father and an American mother. Many of her novels are set in Japan and in Washington, D.C. In 2014, Massey published a new Rei Shimura book set in post-tsunami Japan entitled The Kizuna Coast.
In 2013, Massey debuted a new historical suspense series called The Daughters of Bengal. The first book in the series is The Sleeping Dictionary and is set in British India between 1930 and 1947. In this novel, a 10-year-old peasant girl, Pom, orphaned by a cyclone, undertakes an odyssey through colonial Bengal to survive. With literacy skills, social intelligence and charm, she moves from servitude at a girls' boarding school in Midnapore to a pleasure house in Kharagpur, eventually reaching Calcutta where she becomes involved in the Indian freedom movement during World War II. Other novels in the Daughters of Bengal historical fiction series will feature Pom's descendants in newly independent India.
Massey continues to explore early 20th century India with The Perveen Mistry Investigations, a new mystery series set in historical 1920s Bombay. The debut title, The Widows of Malabar Hill, was published by Soho Crime in January 2018. It centers on the crime-solving experiences of Bombay's first female lawyer, Perveen Mistry – a character partially based on the real life trailblazer Cornelia Sorabji.

The Perveen Mistry Investigations