Vee Kumari
Writer, Actor, Producer
"A journey from the left side of my brain to the right."
About Vee
Vee Kumari grew up in the south of India. A lover of books from a young age, her favorite authors were Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. She would hide to read, to avoid her mother, who might want her to do a chore or two. It was her mother who directed her to use the dictionary to learn the meanings of new words and construct sentences with them.
Vee wanted to become an English professor but went to medical school, where she excelled.
Upon coming to the US, Vee got a doctorate in Anatomy and became a faculty member at the UC Davis Medical Center, where she worked for over 35 years and later at the Keck School of Medicine for five years. Teaching neuroanatomy to medical students became another passion for her. She published many scientific papers and won several teaching awards. During this time, she continued to read contemporary mystery and other fiction.
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When she retired in 2012, she took classes from The Gotham Writers’ Workshop and UCLA Writers Program, and had the privilege to have authors Lynn Hightower and Caroline Leavitt as her mentors. “Dharma, A Rekha Rao Mystery” is her debut fiction that incorporates her observations on Indian immigrants and Indian American lives in the US.
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Vee lives in Los Angeles near her daughters and their families. She is also an actor who has appeared in TV shows, including Criminal Minds and Glow, and produced and was the lead in a short film, Halwa, which garnered first prize in HBO’s 2019 APAV contest.
She is at work on her next novel about an Indian immigrant family whose American dream shatters when one of their twin daughters goes missing.
To learn more about Vee and her work, explore here:
Books
Dharma
A Rekha Rao Mystery
Meet my protagonist, Rekha Rao, a thirty-something Indian American professor of art history. Disillusioned by academia and haunted by the murder of her father, for which she believes police convicted the wrong person, she moves away from her match-making family. She’s focusing on managing her PTSD and healing her heart broken by an abusive boyfriend.
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She gets entangled in a second murder that of her mentor and father figure. An idol of the Hindu Goddess Durga is the murder weapon left on the body. Rekha is asked to help Detective Al Newton understand the relationship, if any, between the meaning of the statue and the motive for the murder. She’s attracted to Al but steers clear of him because of her distaste for cops and fear of a new relationship, sticking to what she was asked to do. The two constantly clash, starting a love-hate relationship. Meanwhile, she’s set up to meet a suitor, an Indian attorney who turns out to be a very likeable man.
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When police arrest one of her students, and accuse her mentor of idol theft, Rekha’s ‘dharma’, her duty, rears its head, and propels her into looking for the killer on her own. Despite admonitions from Al and bodily harm caused by an intruder who broke into her home, Rekha finds the killer, and in the process, emerges from the cocoon of a protected upbringing, to taste the prospect of a romance, and discover her true identity.