Murder and romance make a potent mixture in the plot to The Dowry Bride (Kensington Publishing, $14), the debut novel by Shobhan Bantwal. Sparked by the issue of dowry-related domestic abuse in India, the Robbinsville resident crafted an action-packed and emotionally engaging story of Megha, a young bride in an arranged marriage whose lack of a dowry drives her greedy in-laws to the brink of murder.

   Megha escapes to the home of a more enlightened and sympathetic member of the extended family, but faces a long, tumultuous journey to liberation and a chance to love again.

   ”I wanted the story to be one of hope and triumph and the resilience of the human spirit,” Ms. Bantwal says.

   Before the triumph comes near tragedy, though. The Dowry Bride opens with Megha overhearing her husband and mother-in-law plotting to kill her. They’ve soaked the wood she uses to cook and heat the house with kerosene, and the idea is to lock her in the shed, start the fire and burn her to death. The author chose burning as a plot point because it would leave little forensic evidence, but also because it is not unheard of for an Indian woman in a flowing sari to catch the silky fabric on fire, if too close to the flames.

   ”Burning is the (murder) method of choice since brides are cooking all the time,” Ms. Bantwal says. “It would be so easy to say, ‘Oh, her sari caught fire and we couldn’t stop it.’ Also, any other kinds of abuse would be obliterated with a charred body.”

   Ms. Bantwal, who has been in an arranged but happy marriage for 34 years, is quick to point out that dowry abuse is not the norm in Indian marriages.

   ”The instances are quite rare when juxtaposed against India’s vast population, but the fact remains that it continues to occur in this day and age,” she says. “I was a sociology major and this was a subject I was interested in. I wanted to verbally express how I felt. Then late in life, I took up creative writing so I thought, ‘Why not use this as a platform and introduce it to American readers?’ I was also intrigued by the fact that something like this still exists. In India, women can aspire to careers of the highest profile, all kinds of occupations, yet there is still this kind of abuse.

   ”Researching the background, it made my skin crawl, but it made me even more determined to write about dowry abuse,” Ms. Bantwal continues. “If I make it into an interesting story, perhaps I can introduce the issue to a wider audience and spark a little debate.”

   Aside from the drama that drives the plot, The Dowry Bride sheds light on day-to-day life for an Indian woman, especially what it’s like to put up with in-laws.

   ”In India, it’s still common for the wife to move in with the husband’s parents, unless the son finds an occupation outside of the hometown,” Ms. Bantwal says. “There are some cases where there are numerous brothers and their wives all living in the same home. Now modern thinking has kicked in and many sons move away for work.

   ”In my (extended) family (in India), I still have in-laws moving in,” she continues. “That’s because sons take care of parents in their old age. Hindu families don’t give up on their elderly and they often end up in the son’s house. Family is very important and people sacrifice a lot to keep the family together. It’s one for all and all for one and family needs come first.”

   Ms. Bantwal’s characters are memorable and even comical. Amma, her plotting mother-in-law, is especially vivid — conniving, bossy and a little paranoid, like a South Asian version of Tony Soprano’s mother. That’s not usually the case in India, however, where Ms. Bantwal says the men are “raised to be kings of the family.”

   ”But for the book, I had this in reverse,” she says.

   Is there any autobiographical connection to the evil Amma and Ms. Bantwal’s own mother-in-law? No, Ms. Bantwal says, but she is based on a real person.

   ”When I was growing up there was this homeless woman who was very frightening to me,” she says. “She would go from home to home and beg, just barge into people’s homes. Like I said, Indian society always respects the elderly, so people would feed this woman and send her on her way. You never knew where she’d go, but then one day the doorbell would ring and there she’d be. My parents felt sorry for a homeless woman, but she frightened the children. She had that madwoman look on her face.”

   The book is set in India but Ms. Bantwal is well aware that there are many Indians living in the United States, including a thriving population in Central New Jersey. It’s not necessarily related to dowries, but unfortunately domestic violence has followed Indian women over here.

   ”In New Jersey, there’s an organization called ‘Manavi,’ to aid South Asian victims of domestic violence, and I just discovered a new agency of the same kind in Phoenix, so abuse does exist,” Ms. Bantwal says.

   One of four sisters, she jokes that her parents would have been broke if they’d all been dowry brides.

   ”Fortunately money was not too important to us,” she says. “In the true Brahmin philosophy, money is not everything, it is used for education, to feed the intellect and soul. We had lots of education and we were all married but with no dowries. I count my blessings — my husband has kept me happy all these years.”

   The custom of a dowry is akin to the tradition of an American bride’s family paying for the American wedding. In India, it’s considered more of a way to help the groom’s family with household expenses. Europe abandoned the system long ago, Ms. Bantwal says, “whereas India still has the unfortunate custom in many communities. In fact, to a large degree, it has escalated, despite laws to ban it.”

   With her can-do personality, Ms. Bantwal boldly sent another manuscript about contemporary Indian life to the same agency that handled The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

   ”I read ‘The Kite Runner’ and it was so culturally rich,” Ms. Bantwal says. “The author acknowledges his agent and I thought, ‘If she’s interested in Afghanistan, maybe she’s interested in India.’ That agent’s junior assistant looked at the first 50 pages of my manuscript, fell in love with it and signed me on. Unfortunately, it was ‘chick lit’ and didn’t sell.”

   But Ms. Bantwal was heartily invited to send anything else she had written. The agent snatched up the manuscript for The Dowry Bride in an instant, and asked the author to follow up with another book. No problem, Ms. Bantwal says. She loves to write, to put aside the mundane world and delve into fantasy.

   ”You get into someone else’s mind and body and then you start to write,” she says. “Writing can be so therapeutic.”

   With The Dowry Bride’s romance and the attractive young characters Ms. Bantwal is daydreaming about having it made into a movie.

   ”It would make a great Bollywood movie,” she says. “If you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big.”

The Dowry Bride by Shobhan Bantwal is available in bookstores and online. Ms. Bantwal will read from and sign her book and also will have a drawing for a ‘dowry bag’ at the Plainsboro Public Library, 641 Plainsboro Road, Plainsboro, as part of a special Diwali celebration, Nov. 17, 4-6 p.m. (609) 275-2897. Shobhan Bantwal on the Web: www.shobhanbantwal.com