May 28, 2026
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, by Nina McConigley
“You have to acknowledge wrongdoing, or it will never heal. Vinny Uncle never acknowledged it. He was just like Lieutenant Marley, doing whatever he liked, regardless of the cost to others. Who was going to rewrite our story? Who was going to say what he did to us was wrong? He wasn’t. So we had to.”
Like its protagonist, the American-Indian Georgie (short for Georgette Ayyar, her sister is Agatha Krishna), How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is a mash-up, a mix, and a mystery—but not quite for the reasons you’d think. Set in the 1980s, and scattered with multiple choice quizzes ala teen magazines (“How do you know if a boy likes you? …Mostly a: Sounds like he must be confused…”), this is a story if sisterhood, a novel about two girls who decide to take justice into their own hands and kill their sexual predator uncle, a monster who lurks in their home.
That home is a ranch house in Wyoming, a curious place to be a girl with brown skin, where a mythology of cowboys and Indians (the other Indians) continue to dominate, and the threads of colonialism seems consistent, universal. And this story, which has something of the screwball comedy about it as much as a murder plot, takes on an unbearable poignancy. This is a slim little book that’s outrageous and contains multitudes.
