Books like Murder in Moonlit Square

Ruskin Bond is known more for his simple stories about everyday people in the Himalayan foothills (like a North Indian R.K. Narayan). He does throw in the odd story, which seems like a folktale with a surprising ending like A Face in the Night and The Eyes Have It. This livens up the collection more, as you don’t know when you will get one of the unexpected plot twists.

His books ooze with his love for his adopted country, and he writes with such tenderness about young characters that they are wholesome and fulfilling to read.

What I love most about him is that he is one of the most approachable and friendly authors. He spends hours sitting in his hometown’s main bookshop talking with readers and autographing their purchases. 

A year or so ago, I read a lot of factual books about India, so I was delighted to find this Golden Age cozy mystery set in a land I was falling in love with through books. This book took me back to a pre-partition India still under British rule, with a realistic glimpse of life under colonialism alongside a hefty–hopefully less realistic–dose of murder and mystery.

I adored how Harini Nagendra created a strong, independent female character who still feels genuine and believable in the time and place in which the book is set–a time when most women were stifled, submissive, and governed by their husbands–and how the observations of colonization feel true to life while remaining both sympathetic and observant to the Indian culture and ways of life.

The setting is vividly portrayed, and the sights and sounds of 1920s India are an absolute delight. The main characters… show more.

A deep dive into culture, internal conflict, and the struggle to overcome external challenges. The characters in this book were deep and interesting. Their struggle was heartbreaking, and there was nothing you could do to fix the system they were in. They never gave up, even when all hope was lost. 

An ill-timed robbery and a mysterious ghost train—both from 1914—and the present day CIA and MI6: All are perfectly normal, abnormal elements to this Clive Cussler novel.

I especially like this book for its ties to recent American history. It flirts with elements of espionage and the crackerjack job of merging a confounding prologue with a mystery that needs solving. There is a combination of Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels that have influenced my own story-telling, and this one is among them.

Cussler penned an entire series around his National Underwater and Marine Agency Projects Director, Dirk Pitt. Nearly every one of the novels begins with an event of the distant past that culminates in the present. This novel follows that pattern but involves political concerns regarding the North American Continent. While Cussler’s characters only occasionally rise to the challenge of emotionally involving me, his plots—the twists, turns, and historical antecedents—always… show more.

I thought this book was such a heartfelt and tragic story. It’s about a family struggling with their past as the city of Delhi gets taken over by the British as it becomes their new capital. The author paints these beautiful scenes of Delhi, like the traditional pigeon flying and the bustling Chandni Chowk market.

I could really feel his love for the city in those descriptions. To me, the story felt like a lament for the old Delhi that was lost to the British, and you can sense how hard it was for the author to accept that. In the introduction, he talks about how he left India and was never allowed to return, so this goodbye isn’t just part of the story; it’s personal.

I read this novel as a teenager who had just moved from the heavier Russian and Hindi classics to the lighter English ones. And was I hooked! It remains a lifelong favourite. 

The men in The Moonstone think they're running the show. They aren't. The women are—through letters, through silences, through one servant girl whose sections broke my heart so thoroughly I had to put the book down and go have a handful of namkeen.

Rosanna Spearman deserved better, and a hundred and fifty years later I'm still cross about it. That's what a good book does to you. It makes you hold grudges on behalf of people who never existed.

The modern-day Jaya, grieving after a third miscarriage and trouble in her marriage, goes to India to learn more about her grandmother, Amisha, who lived under the British occupation in the 1930s. Amisha’s servant and confidant, Ravi, tells Jaya about Amisha’s life so that Jaya comes to understand its relevance to her.

I was especially touched to see how learning about her ancestors' lives helps to heal Jaya in the present.

When I came across this book, I was on the point of giving up reading modern novels. Everything I had read recently was such a let-down at the end that sometimes I threw the book across the room in reader rage.

At last, in Rushdie, I found someone who did not disappoint. As I approached the end, I became breathless, worrying that the story was going to sink like a soufflé, but it didn’t. It just kept on rising.

Once upon a time in Fairgrounds, there was a contraption called the Hammer and Bell. It was a test of strength to see if you could make the bell ring. Most couldn’t. Most got the marker some way up the calibrated column only to see it hesitate, then begin its descent. Midnight’s Children made it to the top.

What makes a good ending? For me, it is some transcendent statement of… show more.

This novel made me think in new ways about the lives of contemporary women in India. I left India decades ago, only returning for brief visits, and I often wonder how things have changed, especially for women. In the novel, Mrs. Sharma is a married woman with a teenage son living in Delhi who meets a young man while her husband is away. Her struggle to reconcile her traditional values with her desires is portrayed beautifully by the author, making her internal conflict both unsettling and illuminating.

The deceptively simple—and often funny—writing enhances its impact. While this novel is more “plotty” than the others on this list, it is deeply layered and illuminating simply by its topic. I was so glad to find books by Indian authors that frankly discuss women’s desires.

Sometimes fiction speaks truer than facts. This adventure set in India in the 1970s brings to life what it means to balance yogic ideas with a Western mindset. It's a mixture of hippie idealism, academic disillusionment, and searches for meaning as things fall apart. Beautifully written and wise, it evokes the common ground between yoga and Buddhism—particularly on causes of suffering and how to transcend it.