Description

When a twenty-four-year-old call-centre worker named Tanvi Saluja is found murdered in her Dwarka Sector 10 PG accommodation on the second Friday of October, the case is, by every reasonable internal Delhi Police calculation, going to be solved in seventy-two hours — or never.

DCP Ranvir Singh of the Delhi Crime Branch — newly transferred from a politically expensive case in Lodhi Road, divorced, careful, the kind of officer his subordinates respect and his bosses do not — takes the file at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday. By Sunday evening, he has noticed something the local SHO has not. The dead girl’s left wrist is bound with a single strand of red thread — a *mauli* — that has been tied, very carefully, after she was dead.

By Wednesday, a second PG girl is dead in Sector 12. *Mauli* on the left wrist. Same knot.

Across six freezing weeks of a Delhi December, as the killings continue and the political pressure on Crime Branch escalates and a sharp-eyed twenty-six-year-old journalist named Aaliya Mansoor begins, quietly, to investigate parallel to the police, *The Dwarka Killings* unfolds a profile of one of the most disturbing Indian serial-killer cases in the genre’s recent memory — and of the precise, brutal sociology of a city that has, over twenty years, quietly become a hunting ground for its working young women.

Sharp, atmospheric, and ferociously paced, *The Dwarka Killings* is the most accomplished Delhi police thriller in years.