I’m a terrible sleuth. I was once pranked by someone hiding all of my belongings in a different dorm room and it took me 10 years to figure out that the person who told me about it was the culprit. This is why I read mystery novels. I need to have faith that someone out there can solve these brain teasers, be it Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade or the protagonist in Sujata Massey’s latest novel, The Widows of Malabar Hill, Perveen Mistry. They and the writers behind them affirm that we’re not all clueless.

Long-time Baltimore resident and Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars graduate Massey sets her lush new mystery in Bombay in the 1920s. It follows Mistry as she moves from the office of her father, a Parsi lawyer, to her adventures. Following an inspection of a client’s will, she discovers irregularities with how the client’s three widows—all of whom live in purdah, or seclusion—have signed away their respective inheritances to charity.

“In June of 1992, I left Boston for France with everything in front of me.” So begins the first story in The Balcony, debut fiction from Jane Delury, a professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore.

A couple of years ago, my colleagues and I at the University of Baltimore Creative Writing MFA program watched with pride as D Watkins published The Cook Up and The Beast Side, a memoir and a collection of essays from two major publishing houses, and quickly became recognized as a major voice of his generation of African-American writers. D had just graduated from our relatively young program, and his level of success was a first for us.

An occasional series introducing new books from Baltimoreans

I really don’t know of any writer, living or dead, who fashions a funnier sentence than Jim Magruder, and I mean that in all seriousness. For many readers, the almost vertiginous hilarity of Magruder’s prose will be a source of unbridled pleasure while for aspiring literary comedians such as myself, that enjoyment must be mixed with venomous jealousy.