Mrs Sidhu is an excellent caterer who has a sixth sense for crime.  the bane of the local police, she is also suffering from a lack of clientele after she 'spoiled' a local society wedding to apprehend a thief.  Then she is offered a job at a swish retreat for the 'burned out' executive and her sister-in-law, Daljeet the Dalek, comes to stay.  Now Mrs Sidhu finds herself investigating a series of gruesome murders that may or may not be linked to a cult and realising that she really misses her husband.
I hadn't listened to the original Radio 4 series but the premise and the writer appealed so I decided to read this book in advance of the TV series.  I'm glad I did as I genuinely found the book funny and cleverly done.  Pannu was a writer on 'Goodness, Gracious Me', a comedy series that tapped into that uniquely British Asian sense of humour and this is in the same vein.  Imagine the setting of Miss Marple and with an Indian Auntie doling out samosas rather than cups of tea and you get the idea.  It's quirky and really rather wonderful!

Mrs Sidhu - a caterer with a taste for solving mysteries - has been brought to life by Meera Syal in two series of Mrs Sidhu Investigates on Radio 4 (2017 & 2019) and, more recently in Acorn TV's Mrs Sidhu Investigates (2023). Now, in Mrs Sidhu's Dead and Scone, Slough's answer to Miss Marple is making her print debut!

Having never listened to the radio show or watched the series, I went in to Mrs Sidhu's Dead and Scone completely cold but Suk Pannu does an excellent job of introducing new readers to Slough's unofficial Aunty. Although her sleuthing skills have earned her the grudging respect of the dour DCI Burton, Mrs Sidhu's penchant for crime has made her an outcast in her own community. It turns out no one likes it when the caterer exposes the groom's uncle as a thief right in the middle of the wedding of the year. Sentenced her boss to making endless batches of aubergine bhaji, Mrs Sidhu practically jumps at the chance to cater a fete hosted by Benham House, Berkshire's premium celebrity wellness retreat. But when one of the therapists is murdered, Mrs Sidhu rapidly finds herself cooking up more than just cream teas...

Although billed as 'cosy' crime, Mrs Sidhu's Dead and Scone has more than its share of darker moments. Mrs Sidhu is, at the start of the novel, suffering from a crisis of confidence. She's also grieving for her husband: a process complicated by the unexpected arrival of her sister-in-law Daljeet, and the inability of her son Tez to spend time anywhere other than bed. Several of the side characters are dealing with some fairly weighty issues, plus there's a link between the murder and a supposedly deceased cult leader whose presence in the village led to a suspected murder-suicide some years before. Whilst there is plenty of humour in the novel, it is mostly of the darker variety. 

That said, there are also some slapstick moments in the book. Whilst I found these incidents amusing, the sudden changes in tone were somewhat disorientating. I suspect this would be less evident in a radio play or TV show where audio and visual clues can indicate the change (there's something of the Midsomer Murders TV adaptation about Mrs Sidhu and tonally, I do think the two are similar) but, in a novel, the sudden movement from a comedic 'job interview gone wrong' to a series 'discovery of the dead body' scene was rather jarring. 

I also struggled to really get a feel for Mrs Sidhu herself. She's clearly an interesting, three-dimensional character with a range of foibles but, for some reason, she felt a little flat on the page. Although it was interesting to follow her thought processes, I can't say these really gave me much insight into her character (with the notable exception of several sequences in which she explores her grief and her fears for the future of her business, which were really well handled). Overall, I much preferred the scenes in which Mrs Sidhu was interacting with other characters, as the dialogue is quick, witty, and often very funny. Her interactions with DCI Burton are particular highlights and I would have liked to see more of them in the book. 

The narrative itself is perfectly solid with some excellent red herrings and some great descriptions of character and place (as well as some mouth-watering evocations of food!). Although there were rather a lot of supporting characters - some of whom were a tad thinly drawn - I soon found myself able to distinguish between them and was rapidly drawn into the petty rivalries and long-buried secrets of Benham's great and good. 

As mentioned above, there is more than a touch of Midsomer Murders about Mrs Sidhu's Dead and Scone. Death in Paradise is another show that springs to mind and I suspect that fans of both series will enjoy the 'cosy-crime-with- a-macabre-twist' stylings of Mrs Sidhu. This is Suk Pannu's debut as a novelist so perhaps it is unsurprising that, at times, the book felt a little more like a script than a novel to me. This did however, make it an easy and very 'visual' read and I'll definitely be going to check out Mrs Sidhu's other adventures as a result!

NB: This review also appears on my blog at https://theshelfofunreadbooks.wordpress.com as part of the blog tour for the book. My thanks go to the publisher for providing a copy in return for an honest and unbiased review. 

The premise of this, cosy, culinary crime with an Indian Aunty amateur detective appealed to me. I'm not familiar with the radio show and don't know whether it would help to be. Perhaps I have read too much cosy crime, or perhaps I wasn't in the right mood, but I struggled with this.

In particular, I found Mrs Sidhu difficult to get a sense of, she felt very remote; the supporting characters, some of whom I struggled to keep track of, felt no clearer. There is humour and a sense of menace, but I didn't find flow in the writing and didn't feel engrossed in the book.

I read an advanced copy courtesy of NetGalley.

 I really wanted to like this a lot more than I did - it sounded just like something I'd love. I'm not sure exactly where it fell over in the execution, for me, and wondered if perhaps I needed to have already known Mrs Sidhu from the radio shows perhaps?
It does have all the elements for a cosy crime- a village fete, a suspicious murder, a mental health and wellbeing retreat venue all in a village with a gruesome murder in the past! But I took a long time to get any kind of feel for Mrs Sidhu and even by the end I wasn't quite sure who she was, how old she was, or how I felt about her.
Aspects of the story did tickle me - when she sets up an emergency office in her toilet, for example, to escape her sister in law!
But I think I just wanted a little bit more all round...a bit more character, and a bit more humour, and a bit more to Mrs Sidhu.