Fiction
January 2018
Victims for Sale
by Nish Amarnath
A fledgling TV reporter fights to expose a crime ring where mentally challenged women are sexually abused and forcibly sterilized. Sandy swaps a TV gig in Mumbai for life as a media researcher and BBC stringer in London, where she arranges to live as a paying guest with the Sawants, The Sawants are a regular quiet Indian family. Or so she thinks. But her first night at the Sawants' home finds her waking up to a young woman with a knife at her throat...and a dark secret. An ominous stranger is found snooping on the Sawants' porch, weeks later. The family seems to be hiding something. It's only after Sandy runs a sting operation on a care home for differently-abled women that she makes a connection between an institute acting as a front for a sinister nexus and the odd family she lives with. Chasing the truth up a trail of brutal murders, Sandy must expose the predators and step up to the deranged kingpin of a thriving sex racket. Before time runs out. For fans of Stieg Larsson's 'The Girl Who Played with Fire' and Sophie Hannah's 'A Room Swept White', this debut psychological thriller and crime suspense novel, set in London, is a strident expose on an under-reported form of social injustice where the line of distinction between the betrayer and the betrayed increasingly fades into oblivion.
