Sunday Times 2
A Sri Lankan-American author in an intriguing murder mystery
View(s):NEW YORK – A new murder mystery by a Sri Lankan-American author, Yosha Gunasekera, is now hitting the bookshops in a highly competitive field in New York.
Titled “The Midnight Taxi”, the crime thriller is published by Penguin Random House, a prestigious British-American multinational publishing conglomerate.
“A charming debut mystery told with panache,” says one published review. It is also “Book of the Week” on the First Clue website, which reviews “today’s most intriguing crime fiction”.
When the last fare of the night turns up dead in her backseat, a Sri Lankan American taxi driver works off the clock to clear her name in this mystery novel by debut author Gunasekera.
According to the script, Siriwathi Perera doesn’t quite know where she’s going in life. She never expected to be a taxicab driver in New York City, struggling to make ends meet and still living with her parents at twenty-eight. The true-crime podcasts that keep Siri company as she drives don’t do much to make up for the legal career she imagined for herself or the brother she’s grieving.
When public defender Amaya Fernando gets into her cab, they make a quick connection through their shared Sri Lankan roots. Siri, whose social circle is limited to her grade-school best friend, Alex, thinks things might finally be looking up with this new potential friendship. But she’s suddenly dropped into her own true crime when she discovers her next passenger murdered in the backseat, and she has to call Amaya sooner than she’d expected.
Pinned as the obvious and only suspect, and desperate to clear her name, Siri chases down leads across the five boroughs of New York City with Amaya’s help. But with her court date looming, they have just five days to find out who really killed the midnight passenger—or Siri’s life will be over before she can even truly live it.
With superlative legal credentials, the author of the just-released novel is an attorney who represents people who have spent decades behind bars for crimes they did not commit. She is a public interest attorney with 10+ years of experience in post-conviction advocacy, criminal defence, and wrongful conviction litigation.
Additionally, Gunasekera is armed with leadership experience in launching systemic initiatives, supervising multidisciplinary teams, and shaping public narratives through media, publications, and teaching.
She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and archaeology, with honours and distinction, from the University of North Carolina and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.
Gunasekera teaches a course at the prestigious Ivy League Princeton University, focused on wrongful conviction and exoneration. She is a former Manhattan public defender
and has written and spoken extensively on the criminal legal system. She lives in New York City with her husband.