At 27, Jason Talley of Corning, New York, leads an orderly life, precisely processing loans for a mortgage company. Its warmest spot is his friendship with Sriram Sundaram and his lively wife Vidya. One night Sriram secretly confides he's planning a trip home to India to visit his mother and asks Jason to hold her gift, a gorgeous red silk sari. The very next evening Jason arrives home to sirens and cops--Sriram and Vidya are dead. The cops call it a murder/suicide.

Grieving, Jason decides to fulfill Sriram's quest and books himself an impulsive trip to India. It's a package deal, he learns, designed for retirees. But luckily there's a gorgeous young woman aboard, a train buff with an escape plan, and before he knows it, Jason has cast aside all semblance of order and embarked with Rachel on a perilous journey. How dangerous he doesn't guess since only now does he learn that Sriram, computer genius, was a defaulter from Bangalore World Systems, believed by his start-up gang to have sold them out to software CEO Ravi Murty in America. Jason has sent details of his trip to Sriram's e-mail list, hoping to meet up with his dead friend's past. And he does. . . .

Reviews

Praise for Relative Danger

Nominated for the Edgar and Barry Awards

Winner, 2005 Ben Franklin Award for Best Mystery

"Benoit is a rare discovery, and one hopes that he plans to produce more adventure-oriented mysteries with the same skill and energy that propel this excellent debut."

--Publishers Weekly Starred Review

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Jason Talley is very fond of his orderly life. Unfortunately for him it soon spins totally OUT OF ORDER in this pleasant Indian mystery.

Jason's pleasures are few and well regulated, and he likes life that way. He might be only a paper-pusher at his insurance company in the US, but he has won several employee of the quarter awards, and for excitement he has his weekly dinners with his friends in the upstairs apartment, Sriram and Vidya Sundaram. One night Sriram asks Jason to hold onto a sari he was planning on giving his mother, explaining that he doesn't want Vidya to see it.

The very next day, the Sundarams are dead in an apparent murder/suicide. The couple are so lively and charming, it's really heartbreaking that they don't make it to chapter two. Grieving, Jason decides to deliver the sari as a memorial. Not knowing how to find the family, Jason sends a 'reply all' message to one of Sriram's mass emails.

He gets back a variety of offers to help him in his travels and this chilling warning from his boss: "There were things I didn't tell you about Sriram -- there are people out there who still blame Sriram for destroying their dreams and I'm afraid they might take their frustrations out on you. You have no idea of the role honor and revenge plays in Indian society."

Confused but undeterred, Jason plans for a very tidy trip, taking a slot in a retiree's tour and intending to spend his free time talking to Sriram's friends. But that is before beautiful, impulsive, lying Rachel talks him out of leaving the tour, a monkey steals his backpack containing the sari, a man tries to stab him to death in public, someone offers hundreds of dollars for information on his itinerary, and things get really crazy.

Apparently Sriram once worked for a dot-com start-up called Bangalore Worldwide Systems, which was sabotaged soon after he left. Everyone involved thought Sriram did it, either hating or forgiving him depending on their fortunes after the company crashed, but Jason isn't so sure. Would the Sriram he knew have done such a thing? Would the Sriram he knew have really killed his wife and himself? And what is going on with the red sari?

Fans of Bollywood (which, we are reminded, makes the most popular films in the world) will really enjoy this book as it romps through all aspects of India from a high-powered celebrity party through the worst rotting slums. Fans of madcap hijinks will enjoy watching Jason rebuild his life as he is ripped completely free of everything he thought was important. And fans of espionage will be challenged to figure out who to trust and who is lying as Jason meets the former members of Bangalore Worldwide Systems.

--Reviewing the Evidence

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Edgar-nominee Benoit's assured second mystery (after 2004's Relative Danger ) introduces 27-year-old Jason Talley, a nerdy Corning, N.Y., loan processor whose rare heroic gesture launches him on a journey into danger and romance. When Talley's married friends, Sriram and Vidya Sundaram, are found dead in their apartment, victims of an apparent murder-suicide, the shaken Talley decides to go to India to deliver a special sari to Sriram's mother. He also alerts friends and colleagues of Sriram's from a failed high-tech startup company that he's en route to their country. The sedate tour group that Jason joins is a disaster until he's "rescued" by Rachel Moore, a beautiful train-mad woman who's as adventurous as Jason is not. Soon the two are traveling on their own, meeting up with Sriram's bitter or forgiving ex-colleagues. The search for Sriram's mother, Rachel's madcap unpredictability and the stalking of Jason by one or more of Sriram's former partners add up to a spicy quest tale in an India at once modern and ancient. (Feb.)

--Publisher's Weekly