R.V. RAMAN'S PAGE 2: Harith Athreya series 3 & 4...PRAYING MANTIS, and THE LAST RESORT

THE LAST RESORT (Harith Athreya #4)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 18 August 2026

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: There's blood in the backwaters of Kerala…

BOLLYWOOD

Detective Harith Athreya is recuperating in the beautiful backwaters of Kerala when he meets a family of vacationing Bollywood royalty, who ask for his help making a murder mystery film.

BANKRUPTCY

But the family is not what it seems—there are rumours of major money troubles, links to organised crime, and rivalry between the scions.

BUTCHERY

When one of them is found dead, murdered exactly like a victim in the film, Athreya puts his holiday on hold to solve the case. Is this the work of an angry co-star, or something more sinister?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Latest of the four (to date) Golden-Age inspired mysteries set across the wildly varied, beautiful subcontinent of India. Using plots we've all loved for generations, techniques of obfuscation and misdirection that work as intended here like they have since Mary Roberts Rinehart began practicing her craft over a hundred twenty-five years ago, Author Raman brings new delights and fresh energy to the film-becomes-crime plot. We meet Mrs. Athreya at last! Dekight beams out of every passage she appears in, as her lifelong love of Bollywood and its films is meshing with the Gurua family's vacationing next to the resort she;s brought her husband to as he recuperates from dengue fever.

It's permaybehaps not my own favorite, that would be Grave Intentions, as this entry lacks some expansiveness of characterization that it could've used. No one involved in the aforementioed Guria family is realized all that well, in fact as the mystery unfolds it begins to feel as though Author Raman simply hasn't got much interest in them, leaving them mostly feeling like labels. The murder being a near-pefect echo of a famous scene in a Guria-produced movie really doesn't feel organic but put there to pique Mrs. Athreya's ongoing interest in the proceedings...a kind of authorial bribe to the character from the auythor that sadly doesn't keep her onscreen nearly long enough.

I'm so deeply pleased we gave the Dramatis Personae, two maps, and a pretty detailed Guria family tree; it is very helpful indeed. I'm always happier with these inclusions in any murder mystery. It's not always clear from dialogue and narration how everything fits together without maps.

A series I'm very happy I've discovered, and expect will continue.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


PRAYING MANTIS (Harith Athreya #3)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: ISOLATION

Harith Athreya is taking a well-earned break at a boutique hotel in the Himalayan foothills. But his holiday is swiftly cut short when mysterious bloody handprints start appearing on the walls around the resort.

INCRIMINATION

When a woman then falls to her death, chaos and confusion reigns. The hotelier is convinced that the key to the case rests with four other young people who checked in at the same time as the victim, all pretending for some reason not to know each other.

INTRIGUE

Did one of these guests have something to do with it? Harith Athreya must get to the bottom of the case before the murderer strikes again…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The PreCrime Unit strikes again, this time in a very exclusive resort in the sweetest spot possible: a castle in a Himalayan valley. The owner is a friend of Athreya's who's harboring dark suspicions about a small group of guests staying in his resort. Unease is not proof of guilt but Javed is willing to bet these five are bad news and innkeepers, like bartenders, are usually correct in their darker suspicions.

It doesn't take loong for there to be a murder, and even less time for Athreya to see past spurious alibis, though the motivation for the specific crime committed is not really believable to me. I got a bit over the fashion focus of this entry in the series as well...you're in the Himalayas! Tell me more about them not about fabric colors!

Personal crotchet, that; others will feel differently. It's so good to have the Dramatis Personae, the maps, and our brief character descriptions to refer to. I'm not going to tell you I loved the story, a take on one of Dame Agatha's most famous stories which even naming will give everything away. It's a good enough hommage to its famous progenitor. It isn't my favorite thing to have a woman in the story who's pretty thoroughly demonized for what felt to me to be ridiculous, overblown reasons. I'm not convinced by them as you can tell.

I can't quite go all four stars given my reservations but I'll most definitely be picking up book four.