Books: Murder Most Exotic

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Holmes haunts The Hamilton Case (Little, Brown; 307 pages) as well, a miniature masterpiece of a mystery by Michelle de Kretser, who lives in Australia but was born on the island of Sri Lanka. The Hamilton Case is set there, back when it was the English colony of Ceylon--"a useful bauble," De Kretser writes, "fingered and pocketed by the Portuguese, Dutch and British in turn." Our hero is Sam Obeysekere, a Ceylonese lawyer educated at Oxford who, with his genteel Western airs, is seemingly bent on out-Englishing the English. His story takes some time to reveal itself as a mystery, but it does so when Obeysekere takes on the case of a respectable English planter--Hamilton--who gets shot in the chest. "Murder, a moonless night, the jungle crowding close."

Obeysekere fancies himself a Holmesian observer in his own right and an instrument of English justice, but he can't see the treacherousness--as a Ceylonese prosecuting a case involving white men--of the territory he's treading. De Kretser's prose is stunning and subtle in depicting his downfall, evoking the glittering excesses of colonial life--after a party "you could have strolled across the lagoon on the champagne corks"--and the tropical fecundity of Ceylon with equally irresistible power. Who could stop reading a chapter that begins, "Her father, a bony, vivid man with a taste for women and morphine, had drowned in the rip off Trincomalee on Maud's sixteenth birthday"?

Who killed Hamilton? The closer the novel comes to its conclusion, the more crowded it becomes with possible solutions. The murderers are multiple, the motives numberless, the conspirators legion. Obeysekere fails to grasp a truth mastered by all these writers in different ways: that mystery is not the fate of the unfortunate few; it's not confined to stormy nights and remote houses and crime scenes. It is the condition in which we live, and sometimes the all-knowing detective arrives too late to wrap up the loose ends or not at all. "Time never simplifies--it unravels and complicates," De Kretser writes. "Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken."