October MysteryKIT: Minorities/Diverse

For October we have Minorities/Diversity.

This blurb from beebeereads who first had the idea for this months KIT seems to say what it's about very well:

When I think of diversity I think, gender orientation, race, differently abled, religious preference and probably there are more areas we could explore. So for instance Sujata Massey has a series where the main character is a woman in 1920's Bombay from a religious minority. The first in the series is The Widows of Malabar Hill. I know there is at least one series that features a Muslim woman as the detective. I just heard about a detective who is wheelchair bound. So it might take some digging, but there are books out there. Finding woman would be pretty easy, but stretching to less represented minorities could be more challenging, (and more fun) and maybe too narrow considering what is available in publishing.

Here's the wiki: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/MysteryKIT_2021

Sorry to be so late posting this, I completely forgot that I was supposed to host this month.

My most likely choices for this are:

Sundowner Ubuntu by Anthony Bidulka, next in a series with a gay PI from Saskatchewan

The Blood Pit by Kate Ellis, next in a series with a black policeman from Devon.

I'll be reading A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow. The investigator is a woman and an Alaskan Aleut.

I'm planning on Shine by Lauren Myracle.

I'll be starting off with The Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Massey, then on to Winter Counts which features a Lakota Indian investigator.

I will continue with the Perveen Mistry series and read The Bombay Prince. I would also like to find another book on my TBR that meets this challenge. I'll be watching the suggestions here for sure.

I'm going to read The Caves of Steel. AI detective.

>8 majkia: Oh, I liked that one!

I plan to read A Spoonful of Murder by Robin Stevens. The sleuths are two teenage girls, one of whom is Asian. I have read others in this series, and they are delightful. (I guess kids as sleuths would certainly qualify as diverse!)

If I have enough time, I would also like to read one of the Murder She Wrote novels, since the sleuth is an elderly lady. Sometimes I feel as if senior citizens get overlooked, as do kids.

I have several Tony Hillerman mysteries sitting here, unread. The detectives are native Americans, so I believe that would fit this category.

>10 LadyoftheLodge: I'm going to read a book in the Robin Stevens series too! Next up for me is Poison Is Not Polite, a.k.a. Arsenic for Tea.

>12 christina_reads: I have not read that one yet! I will be interested to see how you like it.

I read The Burning Wire by Jeffery Deaver for this

I started Kommissar Pascha which features a Turkish-born police-officer in Munich, but liked none of the characters, so I bailed. Sorry.

I am reading Crime and Poetry in which the sleuth is a woman from Chicago who is trying to solve a murder to take the suspicion off her elderly grandmother. The sleuth works alongside a police chief who is Native American.

I finished The Bombay Prince, the third in a series I had been enjoying. Frankly for me it was disappointing...waaaay tooo slow. It did however nicely meet the criteria for this challenge. Taking place in 1920's Bombay, the author explores the various religious and social/political groups around the visit of the current Prince of Wales. So it was definitely informative of that era and the challenges of a diverse city.

I'm reading The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey and like >17 beebeereads: I'm finding it very slow. About 25% of the way, so I'm hoping it picks up. Glad I wasn't born in Perveen's time and place.

>18 VivienneR: As I recall that one picks up and it definitely kept me interested in her story. Hope you find it enjoyable. And yes, who would wish to live amidst all of those stifling rules? As always, even with our challenges, I am glad to be alive in this century.

COMPLETED four books from the Wesley Peterson series by Kate Ellis, featuring a black detective inspector in Devon:

The Blood Pit
A Perfect Death
The Flesh Tailor
The Jackal Man

The original post mentioned "differently abled", so I'm counting Murder in Grub Street here, as Sir John Fielding is blind. Very enjoyable picture of 18th century London.

Not rushing anyone, but November thread is up!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/336038

I am reading Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman. Native American police officers investigate a murder on the reservation.

>23 lowelibrary: woo! I'm reading People of Darkness.

>24 fuzzi: This is my first Tony Hillerman someone gave me that one and Sacred Clowns

>25 lowelibrary: I think this is my third, I like them that much. Hillerman was a good story-teller.

Currently reading What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch, which features a mixed race teenage sleuth.

Finished reading People of Darkness by Tony Hillerman

Jim Chee is a young Navajo, contemplating a law enforcement career with the FBI, when he's hired by a local woman to find an item taken during a burglary. And suddenly he faces pushback, evasions, and bullets.

I liked the characters in this mystery, and how the author skillfully interweaves Chee's heritage into the story.

Shine / Lauren Myracle
4 stars

When 16-year old Cat’s (former) best friend Patrick is beaten up and left for dead by someone – likely because he’s gay – Cat doesn’t trust that the small town police are trying very hard to find the culprit(s), so she does some digging of her own. Although, everyone knows everyone, for the past three years, Cat has pretty much shunned everyone (including Patrick), except her brother, who was also friends with Patrick, so it’s not that easy to get info out of people. While she learns some new, surprising things about the people she thought she knew, she is trying to come to grips with something that happened to her at the time she began to ignore everyone when she was 13.

I really liked this. As interesting as it was even from the start, it kept building to the end. I also liked the character from out of town who was introduced. There are some nice (mostly repeated, I think) dark illustrations between chapters, and I liked the way the scene was “set” at the start of the book, via what looks like a newspaper clipping, reporting the attack on Patrick.

I read W Is for Wasted by Sue Grafton, in which several important characters are living mostly on the beach and in a shelter in the fictional Santa Teresa, California. Their marginalized existence is also important to the plot.

I picked up Little Green by Walter Moseley. The author is an unknown to me but I believe his detective is Black. Too late for October but I will probably read it in November and count it anyway.

>31 VivienneR: I read Little Green by Walter Mosley
This was my first book by Mosley and evidently in the previous entry in the series "Easy Rawlins" had Easy go over a cliff in his car. Fortunately Mosley brought the Black detective back to continue in this episode, set in 1967 in the early days of hippie era. After wakening from a two month coma, Rawlins is quickly asked to track down a missing young man, Evander "Little Green" Noon who was last seen in Los Angeles hanging out with hippies. Kept on his feet with a home-made medicine, Easy manages to accomplish the task and along the way experiences life in new age California. which Mosley relates in authentic detail, including omnipresent racism, free love, and drugs. More a time capsule than a mystery, this features excellent plotting and characters.