Nev March Books in Order

Nev March was born in Mumbai, India, and grew up there in a Parsi Zoroastrian family. She started writing young, and by age eleven she was already making stories, poems, and longer pieces of her own. For her, writing was not a late discovery. It was there from the start.

Mystery came early too. March has said her mother read Arthur Conan Doyle aloud at bedtime, so Sherlock Holmes was part of the household long before Captain Jim Agnihotri appeared on the page. She has also named Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and Mary Stewart among the writers who shaped her.

That early reading stayed with her.

Before fiction became her public life, March spent years working in business analysis while raising a family. She kept writing through those years and completed several manuscripts, but in 2015 she made a clean turn back toward fiction. She has said she wrote five novels before entering the fifth in the contest that changed her career.

The spark for Murder in Old Bombay reached back even further. As a teenager in Mumbai, March had heard the old story of two young Parsi women who died after falling from the Rajabai clock tower in 1891. The case was passed down as a warning to girls. March returned to it years later and asked a novelist's question: what if someone had truly tried to solve it?

That book became her breakthrough. Murder in Old Bombay won the Minotaur Books and Mystery Writers of America award for best first crime fiction before publication, and March was the first Indian-born writer to receive that prize. When the novel appeared in 2020 it also went on to become an Edgar and Anthony finalist. Readers often respond to its blend of real history, strong emotion, and old-school detection.

She kept building from there. Peril at the Exposition moves Jim and Diana to America and drops them into the noise, promise, and danger around the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The Spanish Diplomat's Secret turns inward, trapping the pair on an ocean liner with a locked-cabin murder. The Silversmith's Puzzle sends them back to Bombay for a case that cuts close to family and community. These books are for readers who like clues, travel, and a marriage tested by pressure.

She likes big settings, but she never forgets the people inside them.

Across her fiction, March returns to identity, race, class, loyalty, moral boundaries, and the rules that decide who belongs where. Her main characters often live between worlds, which makes them sharp observers and sometimes uneasy insiders. That tension gives the mysteries their weight, whether the setting is colonial India, Boston, Chicago, or mid-voyage at sea.

March lives in New Jersey with her family. She teaches creative writing and movie analysis at Rutgers University's Osher Institute, writes screenplays as well as fiction, and has also worked on community and literary projects, including writing and editing for the FEZANA Journal. She is active in the Zoroastrian community as well, and has created an oral history project to preserve immigrant stories. The result is work that feels researched, personal, and deeply interested in how history presses on private lives.