The Blood Cipher

Some truths are more dangerous than any lie.

Meera Varma spent her life trying to read the world's oldest unsolved script - the marks on the 5,000-year-old seals of the Indus cities that no one has deciphered in a hundred years. The night she finally cracked one, she was murdered. The police call it an accident. But her torch was switched off.

All she leaves her estranged brother is a photograph of a small clay seal and three unfinished words: it's in us.

Arjun Varma is a disgraced geneticist who now tests cheek swabs in a shabby lab above an aquarium shop - the last man on earth who wanted this. But the stone his sister died for is no myth and no treasure. It's a bilingual: two scripts, one message, the key that finally makes the silent seals speak. And what they say could rewrite who a billion people believe they are - that north and south were never separate, never pure, but one mixed family from the very beginning.

Three ruthless powers already know. A builder who owns the official past. A patron who wants a truth that flatters him. A corporation that sells purity by the certificate. Every one of them would rather burn the stone than let it be read aloud.

From a Bangalore lab to a burning trench in the deep south, from a lamp-lit dig in 1924 to a river city five thousand years gone, Arjun and a fierce Tamil epigrapher race to decipher the seventh seal before the people who killed Meera finish the job.

Blood doesn't argue. The only question is whether they live long enough to prove it.

A razor-sharp, deeply Indian thriller for readers of Dan Brown and Ashwin Sanghi - about the most dangerous thing in the world: the truth of where we come from.