Every member of Jayshree’s big Indian American family has a plan to kill Grand Mom. Her sister favours a shark. Her mother would do it by accident. And her father would use a pillow, so it feels like falling asleep. Jayshree herself picked a long-range rifle, mainly so she would not have to stand near the old woman. The plans get announced over hibachi at the family’s annual December reunion in New Jersey, and the funnier and more disturbing the better. My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru opens at exactly such a dinner, with Grand Mom announcing that she is rewriting her will so that only three favourite relatives get her valuable properties in Bengaluru. Minutes later, a white pickup truck comes out of nowhere in the car park, and the joke stops being one.
The Invisible Cousin at a Killer Family Reunion
Jayshree is sixteen, biracial, a varsity soccer player who plans to apply to the Naval Academy, and the cousin everyone forgets. After the hibachi dinner, an uncle asks where she is while she is standing directly in front of him. In groups she freezes; she can knock girls over on a soccer pitch but cannot answer a teacher’s follow-up question. Grand Mom, who calls her the family “sleuth” after a childhood phase of solving small household mysteries, is the only one who seems to notice her at all. At that fateful dinner she even names Jayshree the future executor of the new will, a job that disqualifies her from inheriting and makes her the one person in the family with nothing to gain.
So when Grand Mom ends up in a coma and Jayshree starts to suspect the driver meant it, the investigation becomes a way of making herself seen. With her cousin Prithi and Prithi’s girlfriend Beks, and later a rotating cast of younger cousins, she stakes out used-car lots, eavesdrops on the aunties, sneaks into offices and runs a suspects meeting on a whiteboard. The first time the others actually listen to her plan is a small, quietly moving moment.
This is the thread that makes My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru work. The whodunit is fun, but the real question is whether Jayshree will ever raise her voice, and the book lets her do it in stages: to a snide cousin, to her mother, to a frightening uncle, until she is giving orders to people who have ignored her for years.
When My Killer Family Stops Joking
The second thread is the family itself, and here Thiru takes real risks. The Devis are hilarious. There is an aunt who wakes everyone at six with a gong for a sadistic “physical challenge”, an aunty who orders the children to chant a prayer one hundred and eight times, and a fake engagement ceremony staged for Jayshree and a handsome college student who has turned up as a cousin’s guest. The dialogue is quick and crude and very funny.
But the family also contains a doctor uncle who has hit his wife for years, an uncle whose reaction to his daughter being gay is venomous, and a mother whose habit of telling Jayshree not to “make a scene” turns out to explain a great deal. My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru does not use these as twists. It shows how families carry them in plain sight, and how the jokes sit on top.
It is also good on being “half” anything. Jayshree feels not quite Indian enough among her aunties and not quite white either. Her father, a university counsellor and the family’s resident crier, has three gentle mantras about concern, safety and vulnerability, and they end up doing a surprising amount of work in the plot.
The mystery itself moves briskly. The suspects rotate, each chapter ends on a hook, and Thiru is good at planting details that come back later. The final act is genuinely tense, and the resolution is satisfying without being cosy. Along the way, My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru finds room for one gloriously ridiculous set piece in a hospital, where the amateur sleuths get an important call badly wrong, and for a quieter scene in a prayer room where Jayshree tries to work out what, if anything, she believes. Both show a writer who trusts his teenage readers with comedy and seriousness in the same book.
Where It Gives Ground
- The tone lurches. A slapstick lassi-chugging race and a scene of domestic violence sit only a few chapters apart, and the book does not always manage the gear change.
- Some suspects are signposted. Readers who know the genre will spot at least one red herring as a red herring very early.
- The romance is sugary. The love interest is so polite, so gallant and so ready with speeches that he feels more like a wish than a person.
- The cast is huge. A family tree helps, but it takes a hundred pages to keep all the aunts, uncles and cousins straight.
Content Notes
Content notes: domestic violence on the page and remembered; a homophobic parent; an adult deliberately intimidating and physically threatening a teenager; attempted murder, including a hospital medication scare and a violent car crash; a remembered incident suggesting an uncle’s predatory behaviour towards a child; underage drinking; frequent strong language and sexual jokes; miscarriage and cancer mentioned in passing. It suits readers of about fourteen and up.
Read These Next
Five for readers who finish My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru and want more:
- The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. A teenager, a vast fortune and a family that would kill for it.
- Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson. An adult family reunion mystery with the same gallows humour.
- The Reunion Dinner by Jesse Q. Sutanto. A loud, loving family gathering where the food is as important as the secrets.
- Five Survive by Holly Jackson. A tight YA thriller for readers who want more dread and fewer jokes.
- Such Charming Liars by Karen M. McManus. Another YA mystery built on family secrets and a teenager who will not leave them alone.
This appears to be Thiru’s debut, and his acknowledgements explain that it grew out of his own family’s reunions.
What Stays With You
The image I keep returning to is the fake wedding. At a strip-mall studio stuffed with saris and cricket bats, the cousins dress Jayshree as a bride and stage a mock wedding, and she headbutts the groom and face-plants in her heels while the family throws rice. It is ridiculous and humiliating, and it is also the first time the whole family has made her the centre of anything.
My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru is uneven in tone and sweeter than it needs to be on romance. But it is sharp, generous and very funny, and it understands that the loudest families can still have a child in the middle who nobody hears. Watching Jayshree learn to make a scene, on purpose and on her own terms, is the best reason to pick it up.
