Sacred Games

Sacred Games is a novel by the Indian-American writer Vikram Chandra, published in 2006. It is a long crime novel set in Mumbai, and it won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award after its release. The published edition runs to nearly a thousand pages.

Inspector Sartaj Singh is the only Sikh officer on the city's police force and is used to being identified by his turban, his beard and the cut of his trousers. He is past forty, his marriage is over and his career has stopped moving when he is, in effect, invited to go after Ganesh Gaitonde, the most wanted gangster in India.

Gaitonde tells him about a criminal life that stretches from the 1980s into the 1990s and then takes his own life, leaving behind hints about the people he worked with and about the meaning of his final words. The book runs along two lines at once, the pursuit in the present and the story of the underworld in the years before, and Chandra worked on it for seven years.