Description

Six weeks before the largest IPO in Indian history, on a Thursday night on the forty-third floor of the Aviraj Tower in Bandra Kurla Complex, a twenty-eight-year-old junior banker named Sneha Pillai is found dead in a locked conference room — a single empty glass of whisky on the table, an apparent suicide note on her laptop, and a 14,000-page deal-room document that has, sometime in the last four hours, been very carefully altered.

Aviraj Capital’s senior management would like the matter closed by Monday morning. Sneha’s roommate — a sharp-eyed twenty-nine-year-old equity analyst named Tara Menon — has other plans.

Across six tightly-paced weeks of pre-IPO chaos, Tara begins to quietly investigate the death her own firm is desperate to bury. What she discovers, in late-night database queries, in deleted Bloomberg chats, in a flash drive Sneha had taped under her desk, is a conspiracy that runs from the forty-third floor of the Aviraj Tower to a private bank in Singapore, a shell company in Mauritius, a sitting Member of Parliament, and a quietly inflated valuation that — if exposed — will not just kill the IPO. It will collapse one of the largest Indian conglomerates of the decade.

Tara has twenty-three working days. Her bosses are watching. Someone has begun following her Uber rides home.

Sleek, intelligent, and addictively paced, *The Forty-Third Floor* is a corporate thriller for readers of *Mike Bartlett* and *Robert Harris* — a Mumbai high-finance noir that will be impossible to put down once you begin.