Some books deserve better treatment from their readers. This book is one such. Unfortunately, I was forced to read this in spurts thanks to the busyness of the season. Yet, I picked it up whenever possible with great joy, only to set it aside with a sigh or remorse each time chores took precedence.  

The book begins with a bang. A young mother on a shopping expedition with a young son feels a sting and then nothing. She is still in a coma and hence doesn’t know that she was injected with Rohypnol and that her son is kidnapped.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, a TV producer, Anya Aulakh, is drugged in the car park and later resurfaces at her doorstep with missing memory. Her worried friends insist on a blood test. She too is found with Rohypnol in her blood.

Enter ACP Karan Singh Shekhawat and his young Urban Crimes team. They are in the midst of investigating a bizarre string of cases where victims are mysteriously drugged and left with missing memories, but with no robbery or stolen documents. All they are struggling with are missed opportunities, like attending important meetings or missing their flights. All of them, except for Anya, seemed not to have moved from the place of the crime. None of them seem to have anything in common, and there is no common thread connecting the crimes, if one could call that. Hence, the motive is unclear.

What I liked most about the book was the fact that there was no eureka moment. The investigation was steady. Lots of drudgery, like looking through grainy CCTV images and good old legwork and lots of thinking from different angles. There was no larger-than-life hero, and the team worked in pairs and followed different leads, and all of them pooled their findings. Their investigation is slow, ponderous, and hence all-too realistic.

In the course of their investigation, they stumble upon the fact that all those drugged are unsuspecting victims of an online game that manipulates college students into performing seemingly harmless tasks that tie into a larger, deadly web.

As they continue their investigation, we come across a shadowy Mataji who seems to have all the strings in her hand.

It’s a page-turner in the sense that we want to know what is happening and how they go about the work.

There is a brewing romance, but then the romance is left to the readers’ imagination rather than the plot getting derailed with some unnecessary details. I often find that when people are out to get their culprits, some books deviate with some ill-conceptualized romance in that tense setting.   The only grouse I had was a lot of subplots, and I don’t want to play the spoil sport and reveal those in detail.

I felt that some of them could have been removed and made the whole book tighter. But having said that, the overall impact was minimal, and I endorse the blurb when it says the book would appeal to a wide and diverse audience.

My rating: 4.5/5

I won this book as part of ‘Pass The Popcorn Blog Hop’ in September 2026, hosted by Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed and sponsored by Jaico Publishing House under #EveryConversationMatters blog hop series” powered by authors Sourabh Mukherjee and Puja Mukherjee Khattri