Yosha Gunasekera, "Midnight Taxi" w/ conversation partner Mia P. Manansala

ABOUT THE BOOK: Siriwathi Perera doesn’t quite know where she’s going in life. She never expected to be a taxicab driver in New York City, struggling to make ends meet and still living with her parents at twenty-eight. The true-crime podcasts that keep Siri company as she drives don’t do much to make up for the legal career she imagined for herself, or the brother she’s grieving. When public defender Amaya Fernando gets into her cab, they make a quick connection through their shared Sri Lankan roots. Siri, whose social circle is limited to her grade-school best friend, Alex, thinks things might finally be looking up with this new potential friendship. But she’s suddenly dropped into her own true crime when she discovers her next passenger murdered in the backseat, and she has to call Amaya sooner than she’d expected. Pinned as the obvious and only suspect, and desperate to clear her name, Siri chases down leads across the boroughs of New York City with Amaya’s help. But with her court date looming, they have just five days to find out who really killed the midnight passenger—or Siri’s life will be over before she can even truly live it. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Yosha Gunasekera is a Sri Lankan-American attorney who represents people who have spent decades behind bars for crimes they did not commit. She teaches a course at Princeton University focused on wrongful conviction and exoneration. Yosha is a former Manhattan public defender and has written and spoken extensively on the criminal legal system. She lives in New York City with her husband. ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER: Mia P. Manansala is a writer from Chicago who loves books, baking, and bad-ass women. She is the multi-award-winning author of the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series, the Dizon Detective Agency series (YA), and the forthcoming cozy fantasy, The Spirit Medium's Enchanted Apothecary. She uses humor (and murder) to exploreaspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her love for Millennial pop culture.