The daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants, Yosha Gunasekera recalls that growing up in Ohio, she “saw the criminal defense attorney as this shady figure fighting on the side of evil.” A college internship at a public defender’s office shifted her perspective, and Gunasekera eventually worked as a public defender in Manhattan for six years, representing clients accused of everything from misdemeanors to gang shootings. In 2021, she moved to the Innocence Project, which seeks to free wrongfully convicted prisoners. “We just had a client walk out of prison last week after serving 22 years for a crime based on the flimsiest of evidence,” she says.
Gunasekera, who is co-teaching a course on wrongful conviction at Princeton University this fall, says “the courts don’t want people to question the system,” adding, “I was very curious about that on an intellectual level.” This curiosity spurred her to write The Midnight Taxi (Berkley, Feb.), which draws on her extensive legal knowledge for a locked-room mystery of sorts. Late at night, Siriwathi, a Sri Lankan American who put her legal ambitions on hold to drive her ailing father’s taxi, picks up a fare to Kennedy Airport, only to discover upon arriving that her passenger was somehow fatally stabbed en route. Arrested for the murder and with her face splashed across the New York Post (“sadistic taxicab murderer”), Siriwathi turns to the fare she picked up just before the victim, a public defender named Amaya, to help clear her name.
In writing the novel, Gunasekera wanted to convey, as Siriwathi puts it, “the disconnect in how the legal system really works from how I’ve seen it presented.” The message is delivered with a welcome dose of humor, with Siri and Amaya’s borough-spanning investigation producing moments of Only Murders in the Buildings–style zaniness. Gunasekera mentions My Cousin Vinny, a favorite film of hers that, like her book, employs a light tone to portray a biased system. When she began teaching this fall, she learned that her Princeton students hadn’t seen it. “I forced them to watch it,” she laughs. “It’s essential viewing.”
