This is definitely one of the more unusual books that I’ve read for SEA Reading Challenge, but I think it was the kind of thing that I was originally looking for. It’s been easier to find ‘literary’ books from SEA, but a Mystery/Thriller is pretty unusual; I think the last mystery I read that was similar to this was Smaller and Smaller Circles (would highly recommend that to mystery fans).

The Bone Ritual starts with the discovery of a body – a woman has been choked, her hand chopped off while she was still alive, and a mahjong tile stuffed down her throat. To First Inspector Ruud Pujasumarta, this is a horrific murder, and it’s only made more horrific by the fact that more such bodies start showing up. It’s clear that there’s a serial killer on the loose, but what is the connection to his victims?

Around the discovery of the first murder, Imke Sneijder arrives from Amsterdam with her Aunt Erica. Erica is in Indonesia to paint a portrait of the president, and Imke is back in the country where she was born and lived till she as twelve. It’s a happy reunion for the two friends (as happy as it can be in the midst of a hunt for a serial killer), but Imke soon finds that she is somehow linked to the serial murders taking place.

The story takes place in Jakarta and I loved the setting. The characters pepper their speech with Bahasa Indonesia (and I can finally understand a little) and there’s a lot of descriptions of the food. Indonesia isn’t just an exotic setting here, it’s the backdrop to the case and I honestly can’t picture the story happening anywhere else.

As for characters, Ruud was an interesting protagonist. At the start of the book, he’s down in the dumps, having been dumped by his ex-wife and harangued by his ex-Mother-in-Law, but he never stops trying to find the truth. His rekindled friendship with Imke felt very natural too and it was interesting to see how their relationship developed. Ruud may have lived his whole life in Indonesia, but his mother’s Australian. Imke was born and grew up in Indonesia until they made her leave, but she’ll always be seen as foreign. The book doesn’t really dwell on this, but I thought it made for an interesting character choice.

I read up a little on the author and it seems like his background is similar to Ruud and Imke’s! His great-grandfather is from Russia, but he was born and grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Kuala Lumpur. No wonder he managed to write about Indonesia and his characters so well! And since my definition of a SEA author is a person who was born, raised, and is now living in SEA, he fits the bill perfectly.

All in all, this was a gripping story and I raced through it in order to find out who the murderer was. I really hope my library is going to get the second book in this series because I would like to read more about Ruud and Imke.