I really enjoyed this and was so sure it was a 5-star read until I got to about 80% and everything started to fall apart. The plot points that were painfully constructed started to look like they were all for nothing and I sort of lost the point of over 300 pages of story building. It didn’t help that it was all mostly the same story told from over three POVs but also, maybe it was my fault for expecting 100% redemption for all the characters. 

I genuinely preferred Ajay’s POV because it showed a poor young man with very few options whose blessing of access to the wealthy through service quickly turns very sour. We follow Ajay up to a point before the story shifts focus from him to mainly follow his boss, a lost pseudo-intellectual rich kid with daddy issues and the equally lost young woman with confused morals—and an inclination to be intentionally blind to questionable excesses when it suits her—that he falls for.

The perspectives shifted often and not in ways I liked. There were some I didn’t find necessary to the story and there were storylines I needed more information on like Bunty and Vicky Wadia’s relationship and the actual intricacies of their business because those alone drove many of the decisions and choices made by the main characters. 

It is an engaging story that’s cinematic in scope and filled with a lot of violence, love, and pain. I loved how well it depicted the stark difference between the wealthy and the poor and how it honed in on the dark side of wealth and power and how these factors corrupt everything when given the chance. The dialogue is fantastic and the world is vivid. I will be reading any more books set in this world and I will be watching it when it comes to the screen.