Sacred Games
Vikram Chandra
 Sacred Games combines the ambition of a 19th-century social novel with a cops-and-Bhais detective thriller. (Bhai is a Hindi slang term for gangster.) As sprawling as the heat-drenched city it richly portrays, Sacred Games delves into many emotionally charged worlds of contemporary India, in particular the spidery links between organized crime, local politics and Indian espionage that lie below the shimmering surfaces of its economic renaissance. Money and corruption form the golden thread. In interweaving narratives and voices, Sacred Games takes on even larger themes, from the wrenching violence of the 1947 partition of India to the specter of nuclear terrorism.