The track is covered in snow and it is barely light. Aunt Bhags, the family fitness fanatic, has marched everyone out of bed with a gong and driven them to the local high school for her annual Physical Challenge. This year it is the Lassi Mile: drink a cup of mango lassi, run a lap, repeat four times. Vomit and you run an extra lap. The prize is the silver Ganesha ring she has taken, without permission, from Grand Mom’s finger in the hospital. By the second lap, half the family is bent double in the snow. My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru is full of scenes like this, and one of its tricks is that you laugh until you remember why Grand Mom is in the hospital at all.
A Killer Family Reunion With a Quiet Centre
The Devis are a large, loud Indian American family who gather every December at an aunt’s absurd New Jersey mansion. Their oldest tradition is a joke: every relative has a plan to kill Grand Mom, the eighty-nine-year-old matriarch with three valuable buildings in Bengaluru. Then, on the second night of this year’s reunion, she announces a new will that leaves the buildings to just three favourites, and moments later she is nearly run down by a pickup truck.
The narrator is Jayshree, sixteen, half Indian and half Irish American, a soccer player who hopes to join the navy and the cousin nobody remembers to include. She is the only one who thinks the accident was not an accident. My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru follows her as she turns amateur detective with a small crew of cousins, and much of the pleasure is in watching the invisible girl slowly take charge.
Her crew is the best thing in the book. Prithi, the glamorous older cousin Jayshree has admired all her life, turns out to be fiercely loyal and very funny, with an appetite for dried seaweed snacks and bad ideas. Prithi’s girlfriend Beks, a judo black belt who does statistics in her head, is the muscle. The two youngest cousins, twelve-year-old pranksters who call themselves the evil twins, extort ridiculous favours in exchange for information and steal every scene they are in. Together they feel like a real gang of cousins: squabbling, protective and constantly underestimating one another.
The mystery is built for a group read. Suspects rise and fall chapter by chapter, and My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru hands readers the same clues Jayshree has, so a group can argue over who they suspected and when. There is also a gentle romance with a college student who arrives as a cousin’s guest and is promptly “married” to Jayshree in a mock ceremony by her matchmaking relatives. It is sweet, sometimes too sweet, but it gives her something to lose besides her grandmother.
Laughing at the Table, Flinching at It
A reading group will find plenty to talk about in how the book handles its darker material. Alongside the pranks and fake weddings and competitive curry, there is an uncle whose violence towards his wife has been an open secret for years, a father whose homophobia is exposed in a single ugly speech, and a thread about how women in the family are praised for beauty and silence while the men are asked about their work.
Thiru does not soften any of this, and he does not let it swallow the comedy either. The family’s gallows humour is shown as both a way of coping and a way of avoiding things. My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru asks what it costs to keep laughing, and who pays.
There is also a lovely thread about religion and inheritance of a different kind. Jayshree has never connected with her father’s Hinduism, and the stories she was told as a child seem to offer women very little. By the end, she has found a figure in the tradition she can recognise herself in, the warrior goddess Durga, and the discovery changes how she sees her father.
Every Family Reunion, According to Dinesh Thiru
For all its murders, this is a book about why families keep turning up. Thiru’s acknowledgements make clear that the chaotic reunions are drawn from his own childhood, and the affection shows: the shared bedroom full of air mattresses, the aunties cooking for twenty hours, the argument over who pays the bill. Groups with big families of their own will recognise a lot of it. So will anyone who has been the quiet one at a crowded table, waiting for a gap in the conversation that never quite arrives, and wondering whether anyone would notice if they left the room.
A few reservations are worth raising at the table:
- The tone swings hard between slapstick and serious scenes, sometimes within a chapter.
- One suspect is so obviously set up as a decoy that experienced readers will be ahead of the heroine.
- The love interest is charming but almost too perfect, forever apologising and making speeches.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Start with the family joke. My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru opens with every relative describing how they would murder Grand Mom, and she loves it. Ask the group whether dark humour holds a family together or lets it avoid its real problems, and whether the book changes its mind about that by the end.
Then ask about Jayshree’s silence. She blames herself for freezing in groups, but later realises some of it was taught to her. Ask who in the book taught her to be quiet, how, and whether anyone in the group recognises that lesson from their own family.
Finally, ask about what the family knew and when. Several adults have known about an uncle’s violence for years. Ask why nobody acted sooner, and what finally makes them act.
For more in the same spirit, The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes pairs a teenage sleuth with a fortune and a family of suspects. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson is the adult version, a murderous reunion told with the same wicked wit. The Reunion Dinner by Jesse Q. Sutanto offers another loud family gathering with secrets on the menu. And Five Survive by Holly Jackson suits groups who want a YA thriller with more tension and fewer jokes.
After the Last Page
The final chapters return to where it all started, the hibachi restaurant, with the family crowded into its private room and Grand Mom holding court. Not everything has survived the week, but the jokes are back. My Killer Family Reunion by Dinesh Thiru can be uneven, and its romance belongs in a different, sweeter novel. Yet it is sharp about how families silence people, generous about why they are still worth the trouble, and very funny throughout. A group of teenagers, a group of parents, or both together, will have a lot to say.