Based on actual events, s tells the saga of a journalist who learns that the police have captured five hitmen on their way to kill him. Landing like a bombshell on his comfortable life, just as he's started a steamy affair with a brilliant woman, the news prompts him to launch an urgent investigation into the lives of his aspiring murderers—a ragtag group of street thugs and village waifs—and their mastermind. Who wanted him dead, and why? But the investigation forces him to reexamine his own life, too—to confront his own notion of himself, as well as his complex feelings about the country that crafted his would-be killers. Part thriller and part erotic romance, full of dark humor and knife-edged suspense, is a piercing literary novel that takes us from the lavish, hedonistic palaces of India's elite to its seediest slums. It is a novel of corruption, passion, power, and ambition; of extreme poverty and obscene wealth. It is a gripping adventure into the heart of today's India.