Saima Mir returns to The Conversation to mark the release of Deliverance, the closing chapter of her Jia Khan trilogy, following The Khan and Vengeance. Two crime writers, both working from lived heritage, sit down to talk about what it actually feels like to let a character go.

In this episode:

• Ending a trilogy — the strange grief of finishing a series years in the making, and Jia Khan's evolution from her origins to a character defined by strength, complexity, and resilience
• From the newsroom to the page — how Saima's years in crime reporting shaped the world of the books
• The double standard — why women of colour writing morally complicated characters get held to a different account than everyone else, and why seeing yourself in a story still matters
• Dismantling the stereotype — the tired narratives about women of colour that Saima's work sets out to challenge
• What the heroine taught the writer — what Jia Khan revealed to Saima about herself, on and off the page

And to close things out: favourite jokes, leaps of faith worth taking, and the strangest thing either of them turned up while researching international money laundering.

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