Moghul Buffet

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Both a wickedly funny cross-cultural comedy of errors and an edgy murder mystery, Benard's lively debut begins with the disappearance of timid, pudgy U.S. businessman Micky Malone in Peshawar, an ultraconservative, crime-ridden Pakistani backwater on the Afghan border. As other corpses pile up (victims include a Pakistani banker, a closeted gay Indian movie star and an anti-American Islamic fundamentalist publisher), dogged but inept Detective Iqbal stumbles from suspect to suspect. Bernard choreographs a series of comic misunderstandings (between East and West, men and women), training withering irony on a range of characters: Mara Blake, an earnest American refugee-camp worker reeling from her failed marriage to a wealthy Pakistani; the Maulana, a self-righteous Islamic fundamentalist televangelist; Fatima, his young housemaid and pregnant sex-slave; and the Maulana's nephew and chauffeur, Mushahed, a leftist economics student in love with Fatima. Even if the comedy occasionally sputters with indignation, Benard nimbly swings from farce to social satire, describing with devastating wit and fiery feminist passion Pakistani sexism, censorship, corruption and human rights abuses. (May)

Library Journal

The American director of an Austrian research institute and author of several nonfiction works (e.g., "The Government of God": Iran's Islamic Republic, LJ 6/1/84), Benard debuts with a surprisingly successful black comedy/mystery reminiscent in its droll narrative style of the works of Australian author Peter Carey. The omniscient narrator weaves together seemingly disparate plotlines featuring rabid Islamic religious leaders, corrupt Pakistanis and Afghanis, nave American businessmen, feminists from all cultures and walks of life, journalists and policemen, Afghan refugees, the Taliban, and sexually exploited village girls, creating a compelling whodunit that races along to a bloody climax in the inhospitable desert of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. Micky Malone, a quiet American like so many others trying to follow the rules while doing business in Asia, seems to have been murdered in his Peshawar hotel room, but his body is missing. As more killings occur and notes left at the scene point to a serial killerclothed in a chaddri, the voluminous woman's coverall de rigueur in the provincetensions mount inexorably. Is the killer working in disguise, or could it behorrors!that a lowly woman is offing these creeps? Clever, witty, and politically and culturally on the mark, this book is recommended for all collections.Jo Manning, formerly with General Books Lib., Reader's Digest

Marilyn Stasio

...a venomously funny diatribe on the miserable conditions of life for Muslim women in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. -- Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

People

[An] exotic and mordantly amusing mystery.

Kirkus Reviews

Benard's fiction debut starts out as a crackling mystery set on the Pakistani frontier, but the author's deft blend of humor and suspense lapses into a confusing tangle of subplots. Micky Malone, salesman for a prefab-housing company, gets suckered into a weeklong journey to Peshawar, Pakistan, to close a major deal. The Hotel Khyber Inter-Continental feels frighteningly foreign to novelty-averse Micky, and as his business contact starts making sinister allusions to smuggling, Micky's only comfort lies in his discovery that a female college classmate is living in the area. Fast forward, then, a couple of days, when Iqbal, a big-city detective, is dispatched to Peshawar to investigate Micky's sudden disappearance. Iqbal and Lilly, a journalist, initially focus on Mara Blake, Mickey's college friend, with whom he'd indeed had a brief fling before falling out of sight. But then other bodies start to turn up, suggesting a broader conspiracy. A dizzying cast is introduced before Lilly recognizes the cryptic scrawlings left on the crime scenes as lyrics from a feminist song. Is one of the womenþmaybe Fatima, a village girl forced into prostitutionþthe killer? As it turns out, though, Micky isn't dead at all. Ruffled by an unsolicited visit from Fatima, who was impersonating a belly-dancer, he panicked and, with Mara's help, went into hiding in a shed at a remote refugee camp. In a burst of idealistic frenzy born out of crushing boredom, he inspires a pack of Taliban warriors to build a latrine for the womenþand, in the meantime, murky explanations of the various killings may or may not hold up under scrutiny, while the author's attempts to weave character sketches into acomplex portrait of an Islamic border town also prove only half-successful. The problem: plot and pacing. In her best moments, though, Benard hits a sure tone of fond satire. Still, overall, an overstuffed grab-bag of suspects, victims, and bystanders that invites indifference.