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.[1] In 2000, her novel The Flower Master, won the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel[2]. In 2019, her novel The Widows of Malabar Hill won the Mary Higgins Clark Award[3], the Lefty Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel[4], and the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel[5].

Sujata Massey
Born (1964-03-04) 4 March 1964
Sussex, England, United Kingdom
OccupationWriter
NationalityBritish and American
EducationJohns Hopkins University (BA)
GenreMystery
Website
sujatamassey.com

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,[6] where she attended Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 1986.

Career

Massey worked as a features reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun.[7] 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.[8][9][10][11] 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.[12]

The Perveen Mistry Investigations
  • The Widows of Malabar Hill New York, NY : Soho Crime, January 2018) ISBN 9781616957780, OCLC 983148226
  • The Satapur Moonstone (May 2019)

The Rei Shimura novels
  • The Salaryman's Wife (1997)
  • Zen Attitude (1998)
  • The Flower Master (1999)
  • The Floating Girl (2000)
  • The Bride's Kimono (2001)
  • The Samurai's Daughter (2003)
  • The Pearl Diver (2004)
  • The Typhoon Lover New York: Harper, 2005. ISBN 9780060765125, OCLC 637348032
  • Girl in a Box (2006)
  • Shimura Trouble London: Severn House, 2008. ISBN 9781847510549, OCLC 809416203
  • The Kizuna Coast (December 2014)

The Daughters of Bengal Series
gollark: They can cause "too long without yielding" though, no?
gollark: And some bizarre combinations of features lead to issues.
gollark: This is likely because I have to expose a *lot* of mildly unsafe APIs to maintain CC compatibility though.
gollark: PotatOS's sandbox is several hundred lines of code plus some extra bits in the BIOS, and I have to update it to deal with holes often.
gollark: Do you actually know how to do that securely?

References
  1. "AGATHA AWARDS BEST FIRST NOVELS | Cozy Mystery List". www.cozy-mystery.com. Retrieved 12 May 2018.
  2. "Macavity Awards". mysteryreaders.com. Retrieved 25 March 2019.
  3. {{Cite web|url=http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html}
  4. {{Cite web|url=http://www.leftcoastcrime.org/LeftyArchives.html#2019}
  5. {{Cite web|url=http://malicedomestic.org/agathas.html}
  6. "Bio :: Sujata Massey". sujatamassey.com. Retrieved 12 May 2018.
  7. page 159, Great Women Mystery Writers, 2nd Ed. by Elizabeth Blakesley Lindsay, 2007, publ. Greenwood Press, ISBN 0-313-33428-5
  8. Woods, Paula L. "'The Widows of Malabar Hill' is a thrilling mystery set in a changing India, a century ago". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 31 January 2018.
  9. "Sujata Massey's Sister Widows". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 31 January 2018.
  10. "'Widows of Malabar Hill' kicks off former Minnesotan's new mystery series set in India". Twin Cities. 7 January 2018. Retrieved 31 January 2018.
  11. "Review: Sujata Massey's The Widows of Malabar Hill is wholly satisfying". Retrieved 31 January 2018.
  12. "A Parsi lawyer's tale". asianage. 25 March 2018. Retrieved 12 May 2018.
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