The Thirty-Ninth File

Armaan Khanna has spent years making a living from conspiracies.

He knows how assassins disappear, how intelligence services lie, how governments panic and how a convincing conspiracy should be constructed.

Unfortunately, all of that knowledge came from writing novels.

Then the frightened man who lives upstairs knocks on his door.

Raghav Bedi claims he is already dead. There is a burned body carrying his identification, men watching the building, an illegal pistol on Armaan's table and a warning about an operation called JANUS.

Someone intends to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in Delhi.

The killing is only the beginning.

Evidence has been prepared to make India believe Pakistan is about to retaliate. A different trail will tell Pakistan that rogue Indian officials ordered the murder. Newsrooms, private intelligence firms and government systems are already being fed fragments of competing truths.

And somewhere inside the machinery is File Thirty-Nine.

Then Bedi tells Armaan something worse.

Someone stole the unpublished manuscript of Armaan's next spy novel and has been using pieces of his fiction to help construct the conspiracy. If JANUS succeeds, Armaan will not merely be a witness.

He will be part of the evidence.

By the time a dead man appears inside his home and the police arrive before Armaan has called them, the novelist who has spent his career inventing impossible situations is left with one very real problem:

the lie is already moving faster than the truth.

With investigative journalist Naina Vashisht asking questions powerful people have already tried to bury, and Samara Vaid, the woman Armaan once trusted with considerably more than his secrets, occupying an increasingly uncertain place in the conspiracy, Armaan is dragged through Delhi and beyond in a race to discover what Thirty-Nine actually means before an assassination becomes something much larger.

The Thirty-Ninth File is a contemporary Indian espionage thriller of intelligence networks, information warfare, political deception and ordinary people discovering how dangerous the truth becomes when several convincing versions of it exist at once.

Armaan Khanna writes spies for a living.
Now somebody is using his imagination to start a war.