Tabish Khair, an award-winning poet, has woven stories inside of stories in The Thing About Thugs, a crime novel about a series of gruesome murders in Victorian London.
Starting in a small Bihari village, Khair introduces readers to Amir Ali, who, in an effort to exact revenge on his family's murderer, falsely professes to an English officer named William T. Meadows that he is a member of the Thugee cult. Meadows, who is writing a book about criminality, sees Amir as a perfect study specimen and takes him back to London to record his (fictitious) life story. So when members of London's underclass begin showing up dead and headless, Amir's charade turns into a deadly one--he is the prime suspect in the grisly murders.
This is not a mystery in the sense that the reader is trying to solve the crime; we know who is guilty from the onset. Instead, Kahir looks at the mystery of man, his relationship with others and with the world around him, as well as his actions and reactions to the events that affect him. The story's suspense is driven by the unpredictability of man.
London's underclass makes for a resplendent array of multi-faceted characters who stand in sharp contrast to the dark corners and tunnels and alleyways they inhabit. Kahir's poetic language makes this world he has created explode for the reader's senses: sights, sounds and even smells emanate from the pages, wrapping readers in a web of stories. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts