A- #AudioBookReview: A Shipwreck in Fiji by Nilima Rao

A Shipwreck in Fiji (A Sergeant Akal Singh Mystery) by Nilima Rao
Narrator: Sid Sagar
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, World War I
Series: Sergeant Akal Singh #2
Pages: 273
Length: 7 hours and 33 minutes
on June 24, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Fiji, 1915: when a purported sighting of Germans on the run from WWI turns deadly, Sergeant Akal Singh must (reluctantly) take up the investigation in this vibrant follow-up to A Disappearance in Fiji.
Sergeant Akal Singh, an unwilling transplant to Fiji, is just starting to settle into his life in the capital city of Suva when he is sent to the neighboring island of Ovalau on a series of fool’s errands. First: investigate strange reports of Germans, thousands of miles from the front of World War I. Second: chaperone two strong-willed European ladies, Mary and Katherine, on a sight-seeing tour. And third: supervise the only police officer currently on Ovalau, an eighteen-year-old constable with a penchant for hysterics.
Accompanied by his friend Taviti, who is visiting his uncle, the local chief, Akal sets off on these seemingly straightforward tasks. Instead, they become embroiled in a series of local issues: the gruesome death of an unpopular local and the imprisonment of a group of Norwegian sailors in Taviti’s uncle’s village. To add to Akal’s woes, Katherine, the charming aspiring journalist, harbors an agenda of her own. Will Akal be able to keep her—and himself—out of trouble before anybody else gets killed?
Nilima Rao’s debut, A Disappearance in Fiji, was a critical darling and award-winner, ending up on multiple best-of-year roundups. This next installment in the Sergeant Akal Singh series has all the charm and sparkle of the first book, with even more fascinating historical insight into the realities of life on Fiji at the start of the twentieth century.

My Review:

I picked this up because I LOVED the author’s – and the character’s – debut, A Disappearance in Fiji, and had high hopes that their second outing would be every bit as good. Which it was!

The year is 1915 and the world is at war. But the “war to end all wars” doesn’t seem to have reached the British colony of Fiji – at least not when this story begins. Not until the constabulary office in the colony’s capital, Suva, receives a report from a young and untried constable stationed at Levuka, the colony’s former capital but now a sleepy backwater village – that Germans have been sighted in the remote parts of the island.

After the events of A Disappearance in Fiji, readers are all too aware, as is Sergeant Akal Singh, that his Inspector General has it in for him. Singh came to Suva in disgrace, a last stop in a once promising career because Singh’s head had been turned by a beautiful woman and he revealed security arrangements for the houses of the rich and powerful in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

The mistake was real and stupid and SOME of Singh’s punishment is deserved. But the opprobrium heaped upon him seems to be more because Singh is Sikh and the woman in question was white than because he trusted the wrong person at the wrong time with sensitive information he should never have shared in the first place.

(Singh is only 26 in this second story, so his mistake was mostly because he was young and a bit foolish with it, but the violation of race and caste norms – even though all they did was talk – seems to stick in the craw of the ‘Britishers’ as much if not more than the actual, entirely verbal, indiscretion.)

So, the Inspector General believes that the report from Levuka is at best a fabrication, and at worst a wild goose chase. Making it a perfect way of reminding Singh yet again that he’s not trusted and not welcome.

Even better for the Inspector General, he is able to attach the even more degrading task of ‘baby-sitting’ a couple of English ladies who are traveling to Levuka to his order to Singh to suppress that report.

After all, there can’t possibly be Germans in Fiji. There aren’t any German forces, not even German naval forces, anywhere NEAR Fiji.

Unless, of course, there are.

Escape Rating A-: I enjoyed A Shipwreck in Fiji and was every bit as caught up in its mystery as I was with the first book. I also had the opportunity to enjoy it a bit differently, as this time around I got the audio. Narrator Sid Sagar did an excellent job, not just of voicing Singh himself, but also of differentiating the various characters, including the female characters, in pitch, tone and accent. While I did finish the book in text because I needed to find out ‘whodunnit’ a bit faster, I was still hearing Sagar’s voice in my head for ALL the characters.

But – and it’s more of a little but than a great big but – this second outing wasn’t quite as deep and certainly not nearly as harrowing as the first.

The first story delved dark and deep into murder and corruption, into the inhumane treatment of indentured workers brought to Fiji from India, and to questions for Akal Singh about who he is and who he counted as his own people, as well as a journey into his own soul about the costs of doing what was right versus the rewards of doing what was easy.

This second book reads like a bit more of a ‘usual’ historical mystery, albeit still set in a time and place that western readers are less likely to be familiar with – and all the more fascinating for it.

At the same time, it still follows the arc of the experience of those indentured workers, although from a different point in what became their immigration from India to Fiji. Many of the characters caught up in the murder investigation that Singh finds himself conducting are former indentured workers who have chosen, or been forced by economic circumstances, to make a life for themselves in Fiji. Some successfully, some considerably less so. And some criminally, because humans are, well, human.

Another part of the warp and weft of this story involves the relationship between the British colonizers and the native Fijians, as personified by Singh’s friend and fellow police officer, Taviti. Taviti is the heir to the local chief, and he’s caught between two worlds trying to straddle a line that is likely to bloody him even as it splits him in half.

There is, as in all good mysteries, a dead body. A body that Singh and Taviti practically trip over in the hunt for the mysterious Germans who might be German, or merely European, or just plain suspicious and possibly outright murderous. Or all of the above.  Which leads to Singh not exactly following orders – again. But this time the outcome is considerably more in his favor.

Whether that will be enough to save him from the consequences of striking up a friendship with yet another female Britisher is something we’ll have to wait to find out in the next book in the series. I hope it does because I like this character very much, and would love to see him get out from under the mess he started out with.

But not until after he’s solved a few more fascinating mysteries!

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