Lodhi Road: The Puntland Assignment

 A Hari Vandra novel

From the streets of Brighton to the shadows of New Delhi. From the corridors of Lodhi Road to the lawless badlands of the Horn of Africa.

Crime reporter Hari Vandra thought he knew darkness. Then his godfather, Sir Robert Gage, introduced him to Acharya Bhairava—and revealed a family legacy written in invisible ink.

The Vandras have served India’s intelligence community for generations. Now it’s Hari’s turn.

Recruited by the legendary spymaster Bhairava, Hari is thrust into his first assignment: locate a shipment of biological weapons transiting through Puntland before they reach Maoist insurgents deep in India’s red corridor. But Somalia’s fractured territories play by different rules. Here, Al-Shabaab warlords broker death across clan lines, Houthi networks run weapons through Yemen’s shattered ports, and everyone has a price—or a bullet.

Hari’s only advantages: the tradecraft of Acharya Bhairava, a veteran field operative whose Hindu asceticism masks decades of wetwork, and the enigmatic Anita “Golda” Kinnar, the Hijra mastermind who runs Lodhi Road’s most deniable operations from the shadows and the English aristocrat Sir Robert Gage, a former SIS spymaster and renowned Indologist.

In a world where assets become liabilities and exfiltration is never guaranteed, Hari must become the operative his bloodline demands—or die in a land where bodies disappear into the sand.

Lodhi Road: The Puntland Assignment delivers authentic tradecraft, geopolitical intrigue, and pulse-pounding action in the tradition of Tom Clancy and Daniel Silva. For readers who demand their espionage fiction grounded in the real complexities of South Asian intelligence and global terror networks.

The Great Game is played on Lodhi Road. The blood is spilled elsewhere.

Lodhi Road: The Puntland Assignment is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other leading retailers.