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Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

In Sacred Games, Sartaj Singh is a Mumbai, India police detective with a failed marriage, a stalled career, and while he's uneasy with the brutality and corruption within the police force, he's forced by circumstance to participate in them at times. When he gets a tip about where the area's most famous criminal, Ganesh Gaitonde, is hiding, he sets out to bring him in. He finds Ganesh holed up in a bunker, and when Singh sends a bulldozer to break in, Ganesh commits suicide before being captured. Vikram Chandra's lengthy novel moves both back in time, with Ganesh telling of his gangster career and rise to the top of the criminal ranks, to Singh trying to ascertain the reasons behind Ganesh's reason for hiding in the bunker. Following the stories of these two men, plus various subplots, Vikram Chandra brings to live the thriving city of Mumbai, exposing its vital heart and its underside at the same time. Sacred Games has received mostly positive reviews with the New York Times saying, "The appeal of Sacred Games lies in its mix of several commercially reliable formulas (the thriller, the mob saga, the police procedural) along with considerable helpings of sex and violence plus enough genre-bending twists to keep pulp aficionados off balance and intrigued."