Kota Neelima has been a journalist for over twenty years, covering politics in New Delhi, India. She is senior research fellow, South Asia Studies, at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC. Her recent academic research on perception seeks to develop a structure based on rural and urban voter choices in India. Her previous books include the bestselling
Shoes of the Dead and
Death of a Moneylender, among others. Also a well-known painter, Neelima's works are a part of several collections in India and abroad, including the Museum of Sacred Art, Belgium.
Falak, a young journalist from Delhi, is assigned to a remote village in south-central India where a moneylender is found dead, hung from a lamppost in front of his house by an entire village united against injustice.
Falak coldly hunts the story for a page one byline, unconcerned with corrective conscience, an attitude that cost him his relationship with Vani, a rival newspaper journalist. Within hours of reaching the village, his story is ready; a villainous moneylender killed by long-suffering villagers.
But Falak has also unearths a disconcerting fact, that the moneylender was a kind-hearted, generous man whose death was being used to intimidate other moneylenders. Outstanding loans are written off to buy peace with villagers, but the politically well-connected and dangerous moneylenders plan a brutal retribution.
