This week’s Shelf Awareness Maximum Shelf pick is Amin Ahmad’s A KILLER IN THE FAMILY, an intoxicating drama set in the world of New York City’s elite that explores the underside of the American dream and asks, what happens when you marry into a family that keeps secrets?
It’s time for Ali, a good-natured Mumbai party-boy, to grow up. The first step to settling down is an arranged marriage to Maryam, the daughter of Abbas Khan, a New York real estate tycoon. She’s pretty, demure, and respectable—unlike her sister, Farhan, a sexy, rebellious divorcée.
After the wedding, Ali moves to New York and enjoys the privileges of being an honorary Khan: private helicopters, supertall skyscrapers, and a Gatsbyesque house in the Hamptons. But soon rumors begin to surface about Abbas Khan—accusations of corruption and hidden affairs—and Farhan hints that a violent secret underlies Abbas’s success. Though Ali’s wife insists the insinuations are unfounded, he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something he doesn’t know.
To uncover the truth, Ali launches his own investigation, which takes him deep into Abbas’s dealings and past. As he closes in on the truth, Ali must decide: Can he remain part of the Khan family, and pay the moral price demanded by unimaginable wealth and power?
“Amin Ahmad thrills readers with an intoxicating blend of dark crime story and complex family drama in his tightly plotted and suspenseful novel A KILLER IN THE FAMILY, set in the rarefied, hidden world of the billionaire class where power dynamics, secrets, and the lure of extreme wealth create a perilous moral landscape…
Ahmad is expert at creating the world of the super-rich Khans and illustrating how privilege and entitlement can warp one’s sense of morality in ways both small and large…
The question of compromise, of how much one is willing to give up of oneself in order to belong, whether to a family or to a new country, is at the beating heart of A KILLER IN THE FAMILY and is what keeps the tension high throughout the novel…
Ahmad’s writing is propulsive and cinematic, expertly blending family intrigue and murder with an examination of the immigrant experience and the lives of the ultra-wealthy in a novel that is unsettling, provocative, and enthralling.”—Shelf Awareness
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