Judging a book by its cover is not always a bad idea. One might thus look askance at Bombay Ice--a murder mystery set in India, by a Canadian woman, Leslie Forbes, who works in Britain. Too many Western authors have already scraped the exotic surface of India, and when one sees that Forbes' book aims to be both arty and pulp--pressing meteorology, transsexuals, Shakespeare and chaos theory into the service of a potboiler--one naturally fears the worst sort of self-indulgence.

Ice does careen baroquely through Bombay, the city to which plucky, Anglo-Indian narrator Rosalind Bengal has returned in order to discover whether her half-sister's new husband murdered his first wife. Her investigation introduces her to the usual motley cast--Bollywood sleazebags, slum-dwellers, Hindu nationalists. But Forbes' rich, erudite riffs on these and other topics flesh out the stereotypes, filling the narrative with more (and more intriguing) questions than merely Whodunnit? The book's most interesting mystery derives precisely from this smudging of boundaries: the monsoon rains that drench the former island of Bombay dissolve the line between land and sea; the community of hijras (eunuchs), integral to the plot, blur the definitions of man and woman; the criminals themselves deal in masking what is real, what forgery.

The uneasiness lends the story an air of impermanent malevolence that colors the narrator herself (Who is a victim, who a killer?). Unfortunately, Rosalind isn't unreliable so much as unappealing. She, too, insists upon her right to cross boundaries. ("I was born in India," she says defensively.) Yet for a detective, the loud, brash, self-involved Bengal seems too confident in what she already knows of India--the same impulse, perhaps, that led Forbes to have many of her Indian characters misuse passive verbs, even when declaiming upon weighty subjects. One shouldn't necessarily judge the author by her heroine. The book is another matter.