Column | Top books to read this month: February 2026

This has been a generous reading month, allowing me to bring you several books that travel well. From a murder aboard a zeppelin fleeing Nazi Germany to a locked room in the Naga Hills, from a haunted house to a housing complex thick with civility and secrets. Each story tightens the walls around its characters. There are no exits, only reckonings.

‘The Good Nazi’ | Samir Machado de Machado, trs Rahul Bery

(Pushkin Vertigo; ₹799)

A murder aboard a luxury zeppelin leaving Nazi Germany for Rio de Janeiro turns the cabin-pressure setting into a moral vice: everyone’s trapped together, everyone’s compromised. The title is the dare — what does “good” mean inside a regime built on brutality? It reads like a stylish puzzle that keeps its smile tight and its questions sharp.

‘The Edge of Darkness’ | Vaseem Khan

(Hodder & Stoughton; ₹799)

It is the 1950s, and Persis Wadia, India’s first woman police detective, is exiled from Bombay to the Naga Hills for defying orders. She lands in a crumbling hotel, just in time for a politically explosive locked-room murder. Khan, known for his crime fiction series, keeps the investigation clean, but the real thrill is in how the setting presses in: mist, isolation, and the sense that the “outpost” is its own kind of trap.

‘The Bucket’ | Arnab Ray

(Hachette India; ₹599)

Four friends, one night, and a death they’ve tried to forget — until a documentary starts asking questions again. Ray, blogger and podcaster, makes the horror feel local and lived-in: the fear isn’t just what happened, it’s what memory does when it returns with receipts.

‘A Box Full of Darkness’ | Simone St. James

(Penguin; ₹730 [ebook])

Estranged siblings return to the house they once fled, pulled back by the haunting of their long-missing brother — and by the suspicion that the town’s old secrets still have teeth. St. James does dread-by-accretion: quick to read and hard to shake, with grief doing as much work as the supernatural.

‘A Gathering of Crows’ | Suparna Chatterjee

(Rupa; ₹495)

A gated apartment complex, a murdered birdwatcher, and a detective who must turn to a sharp-eyed 12-year-old for help: all very dependable ingredients for a clever mystery. In this distinctly urban Indian whodunnit, Chatterjee gives us a slow unravelling of neighbourly civility. The writing is observant, faintly sardonic, and attentive to how quickly familiarity can curdle.

(A monthly column on popular fiction.)

The writer is an independent journalist, editor, and literary curator.