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A Metro Nightmare
by Shiv Kumar.
Frog Books.
Pages 200. Rs 200.

A young woman, Gauri, commits suicide on the Delhi metro tracks. Her suicide note claimed that she had killed her husband Siva. Inspector Yashvardhan, a staunch casteist, and SI Arjun Singh, himself a victim of caste violence, are given the charge of investigating the suicide. Yashvardhan delves deep into the past life of Siva to unravel what caused a meek and gentle boy to rebel against society.

Benaami
By Anish Sarkar.
Amaryllis.
Pages 360. Rs 250.

In the mid-nineteenth century, an unnamed secret society, the Benaami, is set up to fight the British East India Company, which has colonized the country. The Benaami spreads its wings across India and in 1857, incites the native sepoys of the British army to mutiny.

Arjun Chatterjee, a software engineer, has strange, recurring dreams. Together with Sheila Guha, the beautiful professor of history researching the Benaami, he sets out to unravel the clues to his past. In the process, they get embroiled in a deadly conspiracy hatched by a megalomaniac with his own connection to the Benaami.

The Year of the Flood
By Margaret Atwood.
Hachette.
Pages 518. Rs 395.

The shun brightens in the east, reddening the blue-grey haze that marks the distant ocean. The vultures roosting on the hydro poles fan out their wings to dry them. The air smells faintly of burning. The Waterless Flood -- a man-made plague -- has ended the world.

But two young women have survived: Ren, a young dancer trapped where she worked, in an upmarket sex club, and Toby, who watches and waits from her rooftop garden. Is anyone else out there?

A Deadly Trade
By Michael Stanley.
Hachette.
Pages 523. Rs 295.

How can a man die twice? That’s the question facing Detective ‘Kubu’ Bengu when a mutilated body is found at a tourist camp in Botswana. The corpse of Goodluck Tinubu displays the classic signs of revenge killing. But when his fingerprints are analysed, Kubu makes a shocking discovery: Tinubu is already dead. He was slain in the Rhodesian war thirty years ago.

Kubu quickly realises that nothing at the camp is as it seems. As the guests are picked off one by one, time to stop the murderer is running out. With rumours of horrifying war crimes, the scent of a drug-smuggling trail and mounting pressure from his superiors to contend with, Kubu doesn’t notice there is one door left unguarded — his own.





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