HELLO, IT'S YOUR PAST CALLING...
"Placing blame" thinks Marina Robinson, "is my life's work. And why?" There's a lot in her past to account for - nightmares and terrors, crimes and betrayals that happened half a world away, ten years go. Now she's an engineer with a great job. She's a failure analyst, an investigator who figures out what causes accidents, and she's working on her most fascinating case--the fatal crash of a roller coaster--when suddenly the phone rings. And her world tilts...The elusive, unidentified caller can be only one person - Catherine, her beloved younger sister who supposedly died in a fire ten years ago. Once again - for the moment abandoning her case--Marina is inexorably drawn back to India, the country that seduced her so long ago in so many ways, where something unspeakable happened to a child, and where she herself participated in misdeeds so shocking she can't forgive herself. She starts by tracking Catherine's lost lover, Nagarajan, the irresistibly charismatic guru under whose spell Catherine fell those many years ago, a man so dangerous, so full of hubris he took his name from Indian snake gods, and who at times seemed more serpent than human. But who is also reportedly dead - a suicide in a jail cell.
Thus begins an odyssey of fear and danger--far from dead, Nagarajan seems to be everywhere, and so do his disciples (at least those who haven't gone mad from guilt). Nowhere, it seems, is Marina safe, nor is anyone who knows anything about the young victim of Nagarajan's atrocities. Wherever she turns, the path seems strewn with fresh bodies. Just when the jig seems up, Marina calls on her skills as a failure analyst and Thompson pulls off a surprise ending that will leave you gasping.
Fault Tree is that rare novel that pulls us into the exotic experience of a stranger in a strange land, much like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust or Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram.
Who will like it: fans of intricate mysteries with an adventurous female protagonist, as well as readers who loved Heat and Dust, Shantaram, John Irving's A Son of the Circus, Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet, M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions, even H.R.F. Keating's Inspector Ghote mystery series and E.M. Forster's Passage to India Plus all Indian movies--and the Masterpiece Theater series Indian Summers!
PRAISE FOR FAULT TREE:
"[Michaela Thompson] presents us with what is perhaps the off-beat thriller of the year, part mystery, part mysticism, difficult to categorize but easy to enjoy." -SAN DIEGO UNION
"[Thompson] cleverly weaves threads of past and present into a cogent tale that speeds the reader through mystic India and home again in an adventure that both thrills and logically unveils an elusive mystery." -LIBRARY JOURNAL
"Full of danger and breathless action . . . Very skillfully plotted. There are well-laid clues to reward the reader who is not swept away. Another cornerstone of [Thompson's] writing is carefully researched and vividly drawn settings. Her Indian cities and countrysides are as convincing as the Florida coast in Hurricane Season." -SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
Genre: Mystery
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