I realised that I’ve only read 6 books for the SEA Reading Challenge this year, despite being back in Singapore and thus having easier access to local and regional writers. So I looked around for some local genre fiction and found the Inspector Singh series by Shamini Flint. She’s a Malaysian author based in Singapore, and she writes murder mysteries set across Asia – how perfect is that?

In A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul, Inspector Singh has been sabo-ed to go to Bali. The police there need help with terrorism experts, and the Singapore police would rather not send their best men (because what if they leave and Singapore suffers from a terrorist attack?). Instead, they chose to send Inspector Singh. He is their murder expert after all.

After a few days of being useless, the Bali police discover a body that was shot before being caught up in a terrorist attack. Since they’re busy investigating a terrorist attack, they decide to get Singh to investigate. After all, he’s not doing anything. Helping him is Bronwyn, an Australian police officer who’s assigned to assist him after making her own mistake.

This was a pretty interesting mystery. I liked that Inspector Singh got to go around Bali and his appetite made sure that lots of delicious Balinese dishes were featured. And while he wasn’t very interested in Bali culture, Bronwyn definitely was, so we got a lot of information about Bali as well. We also got to see another perspective (not going to say who because that might be a spoiler), which added to the tension in the mystery.

Although this is the second book of the series, it’s the first time that I was reading an Inspector Singh mystery. In some way, he’s like the anti-Poirot. While he’s the type of detective that prefers thinking over active investigation (like Poirot and his little grey cells), he’s also very cynical and not as genteel as the Belgium. For all his cynicism, I found him to be very endearing.

Overall, I really enjoyed this mystery. It’s a refreshing change from the Western mysteries that I normally read, and I’m looking forward to reading more adventures from Inspector Singh.