The Seventh Star Volume 1

In the Pleiades, the seventh star is the one you cannot see. This is the one that counts.

At 12:12 AM, in a run-down lodge on Shivaji Cross Road, a young woman falls asleep on the floor of Room 12. In the room next door, an off-duty police constable has already stopped breathing.

For nine days, nobody opens either door.

Housekeepers knock, hear nothing and write "DND" in the logbook. Each one writes the same silence in a different hand. When the manager finally turns the key, he finds two bodies with no struggle, no fingerprints and no known poison. Each victim has the same strange mark drawn on the skin:

seven small dots in the shape of the Pleiades, and a circle drawn around empty space.

Inspector Wajid Shaikh has spent twenty-two years learning to wait. Constable Sherya Menon notices the things other officers walk past. Dr. Rohini Iyer reads crime scenes the way others read poetry. Together they follow the mark to a community hall that no longer exists, to a child no report ever named, and to a cover-up that reaches the highest offices of the city.

Someone has been planning this for four years. They have been calm and precise, and they are not finished.

There are seven stars in the constellation, and only six can be seen. To stop the next killing, the investigators have to find the one nobody was ever meant to count.

The Seventh Star is a gripping, atmospheric crime novel about grief, guilt and the people a system chooses to forget. It is the first volume of A Constellation of the Dead.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Slow-burn psychological crime with a shocking final reveal
• Police procedurals set in India's cities
• Killers who are clever, patient and frighteningly human
• Stories where justice and revenge become hard to tell apart

Scroll up and start reading tonight. Just don't turn the lights off.