Doha-based novelist Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar’s second book in the detective series, No Place for Women, is out. Ali, the detective you met in Rajakumar’s first book The Migrant Report, is back along with three other protagonists, but this time they have a different issue at hand to address.   
It is a novel, the second book in the crime series set in the region and not one particular country, involves murders of women and how the detectives solve the cases. The book has all the elements required for a detective fiction such as a grumpy police detective (Ali). 
“He wants to be in the intelligence community and advance his career and then there is an aspiring journalist. She is like his self-appointed sidekick and then there is an undercover detective who is a Nepali and his sister who is a housemaid,” says Rajakumar, speaking to Community at the launch of her book at The Gate Mall.
The book is set in the Gulf and it does not say which country. The four main protagonists are the same and it is only the situation around them that is changing. Talking about her writing career, Rajakumar says, she has lived in Doha for 11 years and teaches literature and writing at Qatar Foundation while she started writing earnestly about five years ago. 
“I have always been trying to write various books. And then I just started to put my full time attention on it in 2011. I had two or three other novels before this series came out. The first paperback that I had written is called Love Comes Later,” says the writer. 
“It was my first book and it was about arranged marriages here in Qatar and the Qatari society. All of my books start with an essential question. Love Comes Later is about how a modern person with traditional values is going to find happiness and love,” she explains. The writer says she takes about six months to research before writing and usually does her groundwork from May to November. And then she sits down to write. 
Living in Doha, she says, helps her explore different themes and allows her enough time to write that as well. She has also written short stories and essays. However, she feels more comfortable doing a series since it takes a lot of time developing it first and then you can just revisit it. She says she is going to stay with the series of novels for a while. 
Most of my readers, Rajakumar says, are outside Doha. “They are in the US, the UK and UAE. I connect with them through social media and book reviews. Amazon is a good source. One of my books got over 90 reviews there and it helps get people’s attention,” says the writer. The problem about Doha is that there is not much availability of books so there is a problem for people to find out about new books, she adds. 
Her research she says involves a lot of reading related to the genre and she also watches a lot of related films, television, just to see how “people deal with themes through different ways.” 
During the course of her research, she usually knows only the essential problem while the plot develops along the way. 
“Some people, especially with crime fiction, would like to go and fire a gun or do something like that. I feel like my readers are already having enough realism without me having to go and do certain things,” says Rajakumar. 
She says she also talks to people about certain elements. Like there is a Tinder scene in this novel. “I have never been on Tinder so I ask my friends how it works,” says Rajakumar. 
She has her third book coming out in November and it is going to involve ISIS as a theme. The topic is contemporary and as a writer that is what you hope; for contemporary things that people want to know more about. They give you richness to explore, says the writer. 
She says it does help fictionalising stories because in the story you are not worried about what a person’s political slant is or accuracy. Such stories can be really productive. “I am not writing to be controversial. I am writing to explore, trying to look at questions that everyone is thinking about and look at it in an artistic way,” says Rajakumar. These stories are for anyone who is interested in such themes. 
Rajakumar reads a lot of Nordic fiction and that has been her inspiration in writing detective stories. She has the second book in her romance series coming out next year. It is a sequel that she says she is going to pull off in between writing her detective books. 
Rajakumar is a mother of two and believes being a parent helps organise her time better. “You just manage your time. For instance, I am not writing in the time that is for children,” says the author.
Rajakumar has lived in Qatar since 2005. She has since published eight e-books, including a ‘momoir’ for first-time mothers, Mommy But Still Me; a guide for aspiring writers, So You Want to Sell a Million Copies; a short-story collection, Coloured and Other Stories; and a novel about women’s friendships, Saving Peace.
Her coming-of-age novel, An Unlikely Goddess, won the SheWrites New Novelist competition in 2011. Her recent books have focused on various aspects of life in Qatar. From Dunes to Dior, named as a Best Indie book in 2013, is a collection of essays related to her experiences as a female South Asian American living in the Arabian Gulf. 
Love Comes Later was the winner of the Best Indie Book Award for Romance in 2013 and is a literary romance set in Qatar and London. The Dohmestics is an inside look into compound life, the day-to-day dynamics between housemaids and their employers.