Hot Stage

Professor Mudgood is an elderly rationalist in Bangalore, known across India for his outspoken attacks on right-wing forces. When his daughter finds him dead at home, ACP Borei Gowda has little doubt that someone killed him.

Everything at the scene points to a political murder, the kind of killing a man with Mudgood's public record might invite. Yet the deeper Gowda digs, the less he believes in the assassination theory. He and his team begin a parallel investigation, and it leads them into a hidden, murky world that runs without rules and without mercy.

When events leave Gowda with few choices, he gambles on a calculated risk and goes into that dangerous territory himself, hoping to force the truth into the open. Whether he can pull it off, and what it might cost him, is what keeps the story tense to the end.

Hot Stage is a police procedural by Anita Nair, rich in detail and steadily suspenseful. It also looks closely at the squalor and vice that gather in the shadowy back lanes of a sprawling modern city.