Book description
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…. It's not often any book-let alone a
mystery-combines a mortgage clerk, a redheaded, pony-tailed train
spotting Canadian, and a package tour of India, but Out of Order is not
just any book. Charles Benoit's second novel requires more than one leap
of faith from the reader (the clerk, a small town nobody named Jason
Talley, ends up going to India in order to solve an upstate New York
murder), but Benoit manages to combine all the disparate elements into a
cleverly phrased, well-characterized whole. Talley is in India because
he is convinced that his good friends, an Indian husband and wife, did
not die in a murder suicide, the result of an unhappy marriage. Yes,
they fought, but "like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, like Nick
and Nora Charles, like Burns and Allen." This is why Talley ends up
halfway around the world, tracking down leads in the Byzantine world of
the subcontinent's software and computer industries, enjoying his own
Nick and Nora with train spotting Rachel. And if the ending is more
Murder, She Wrote than Graham Greene, it still doesn't detract from
Benoit's effort. A compulsive traveler, occasional scuba diver, and
incurable beginner saxophonist, Charles Benoit has worked in education
and advertising. He and his wife, Rose, currently live in exotic
Rochester, New York. Relative Danger is his first novel. Visit his
website at www. CharlesBenoit. com.
