Her Nightly Embrace – Fun but oh so problematic
/ posted in: Reading
Her Nightly Embrace (Ravi PI #1) by Adi Tantimedh on November 1st 2016
Pages: 320
Series: Ravi PI #1
Genres: Fiction
Published by Atria/Leopoldo & Co.
Format: Audiobook
Source: Library
Setting: England
Ravi Chandra Singh is the last guy you’d expect to become a private detective. A failed religious scholar, he now works for Golden Sentinels, an upmarket London private investigations agency. His colleagues are a band of gleefully amoral and brilliant screw-ups: Ken and Clive, a pair of brutal ex-cops who are also a gay couple; Mark Chapman, a burned-out stoner hiding a great mind; Marcie Holder, a cheerful former publicist; Benjamin Lee, a techie prankster from South London; David Okri, an ambitious lawyer from a well-connected Nigerian immigrant family; and Olivia Wong, an upper-class Hong Kong financial analyst hiding her true skills as one of the most dangerous hackers in the world—all under the watchful eye of Roger Golden, wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, and his mysterious office manager, Cheryl Hughes.
Thrust into a world where the rich, famous, and powerful hire him to solve their problems and wash their dirty laundry, Ravi finds himself in over his head with increasingly gonzo and complex cases – and the recent visions that he’s been having of Hindu gods aren’t helping. As Ravi struggles to stay ahead of danger, he wonders if the things he’s seeing are a delusion – or if he might, in fact, be an unrecognized shaman of the modern world...
I loved this story of a private eye handling high profile cases while the Hindu gods watch him and text on their phones. There are several cases discussed here and they were well done. I want to read more in this series to see what happens with the gods.
BUT….
The first case in the book is super problematic. It only covers maybe the first 1/3 of the book so discussing it isn’t going to going spoil the whole thing but here’s your warning.
A politician comes to the agency because he says that his dead girlfriend is having sex with him at night. It turns out that the politician takes a lot of sleeping pills at night so he isn’t fully aware of what is going on. His former girlfriend was a transwoman and he didn’t know. She was mid-transition when she got sick and then met him. Instead of talking to him about, you know, her life or anything, she would have her twin sister switch places with her at night. Her sister had sex with him. Then the girlfriend died of her illness and the sister kept sneaking into the house and having sex with the drugged guy because she was a sex addict.
(Go ahead and pick all the nonsense out of that paragraph at your leisure.)
Ok, so no matter how you dress that up, that’s a rape case. But, the word rape is never uttered. I think the closest they get is saying assault. I believe you are meant to feel bad for the woman who might get prosecuted if the politician decides to go public. I didn’t.
But then ….. wait for it…..
The woman who should be in jail for rape not only starts dating the main character but she gets a job in the agency.
via GIPHY
I kept listening in hope that something was going to happen to get them to all see that this was wrong. They don’t. The rest of the book is so much better than this. This story could easily have been gotten rid of and not affect the rest of the book. I would love to think that when they adapt this for TV that they will live this case out but these things never work out the way I’d like.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
- Audiobooks
- Books Set in Europe
- POC authors