S.C. Lalli’s Are You Sara? is a delightful mystery novel with a premise that is likely to grab readers quickly.
A woman of Indian heritage is working hard to get her degree, holding down two jobs and keeping up with a set of heavy studies in corporate law. One night while working at a local bar, she’s told to clear a drunk out of the women’s restroom. The two bond over having the same first name, or at least both using a variation on Sara. She helps the girl out the back door where two rideshare vehicles await, barely coherent as she is asked the titular phrase before getting in. She finds herself driven to the wrong neighborhood, and by the time she makes it back to her apartment discovers that the other girl has been killed nearby.
It’s an excellent setup, direct and high concept with plenty of room for nuance and unexpected disturbing complications. The plot is largely divided between Saraswat Bhaduri in the present day and Sarah Ellis in the past. Developments are slowly but steadily eked out to add to our understanding of the dead girl’s history and the unusual life situation of the woman she encountered briefly. It also allows readers to become increasingly familiar not only with Sarah Ellis as a person, but with those in her sphere of life as both friends and suspects. Further splitting the material up into multiple small chapters allows the action to continue moving forward unabated, and tension to build steadily and continuously.
Abusive and dangerous relationships are common in this story, as is an understanding of the many dangers a young woman can face at university. The difference in age between the two women named Sara illustrates that dangers often don’t go away over time. Instead they transform into different yet related issues.
The trade-offs one makes for success, or at least hoped for success, are also dealt with in this book. Each woman finds herself staying, long or short-term, in situations that are not for the best out of a desire for either academic stability or a stronger economic future – an issue nearly all readers can recognize. For Sara Bhaduri these experiences lead her into several levels of danger, and help her understand which lines she will cross to get what she wants. Given her goal of working in corporate law, understanding this about herself would ultimately be a boon.
Violence against women is somewhat of the nature when a murder mystery uses one as the victim, and it occurs throughout to more than one woman. There are instances of threatening, economic and psychological manipulation, and direct physical violence. These do not feel gratuitous, all belonging to the plot even when they serve to darken it noticeably.
Are You Sara? is a brilliant crime thriller. Making clever use of social and genre expectations throughout, it manages to give readers tantalizing hints about the situation without easily yielding the solution. S. C. Lalli is an experienced author in other genres, and her future in the crime and mystery arena looks bright. This volume is easily recommended to those remotely curious.
(Morrow, 2022)