I wasn’t that keen on The Waiter. It’s OK, but overall I found it rather unengaging and a somewhat run-of-the-mill detective story.
Kamil Rahman has been dismissed from the Kolkata police and finds himself working as a waiter in the London restaurant of a family friend. Here, there is a murder at a party for another family friend at which he is working and Kamil becomes involved in the hunt for the killer and to clear a suspect whom he believes to be innocent. Intercut with this is the story of the high-profile case in Kolkata which ended in his dismissal, as it becomes slowly clear that the two cases may be linked in some way.
Frankly, as a thriller it didn’t do much for me. It plodded rather, I found the intercutting a bit off-putting, the prose was pretty pedestrian and if it hadn’t been for the interesting settings I would probably have given up. I did like the descriptions of life in the Bengali community around Brick Lane and in Kolkata, but they weren’t really enough to keep my interest and I did begin to skim without feeling I was missing all that much. The solution had more than a degree of implausibility – not least in the sudden friendly attitude of the British police Inspector – and I realised that I wasn’t all that bothered about it.
A disappointment overall, then, after a warm recommendation from a friend. The book has its merits, but I don’t think I’ll be reading on in the series.
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