Amazon Review
Not so much a thriller as a scathing satire, Bunker 13 is nonetheless full of all the familiar elements of the modern thriller: spies, action and debauchery. Investigative journalist Bahal is an expert on the corruption endemic in Indian public life and his first novel is sardonic in its portrayal of a world in which everything is for sale, all the time. MM, his alter ego and protagonist, peels off layer after layer from the world in which he moves and from his own identity; just as we think MM can not get any more double-dealing and mercenary, he always manages to sink to yet another depth. Along the way, we find out about sexual shenanigans at a military academy, the inventive revenges of the Russian mafia, the particular pleasures of hard-drug abuse during paratroop drops and the going rate for souls, heavy armaments and flayings. Bunker 13 is the site of a particularly vicious massacre in the course of the Kashmir conflict, but this is not the heart of MM's darkness, merely one step in his journey--this is one of the most abrasively upsetting books you will read this year. The other thing that has to be said about Bunker 13 is that it is scabrously, sardonically hilarious--you read it with constant amazed amusement and a real sense of guilt at finding it funny. Bahal has a real gift for pulling certainties about morality and who his narrator is out from under us. --Roz Kaveney