The Pinnacle

Abir Mukherjee is best known for the award-winning Wyndham & Banerjee series set in 1920s British Raj India. His first standalone novel, the thriller Hunted was released in 2024 and was an extraordinary read. He now releases a second standalone The Pinnacle which like its predecessor is set in contemporary times.

The Pinnacle is a razor-edged social satire that contrasts the world of the ultra-rich with that of the desperate, using an exclusive high-rise bloc to cynically expose the seedy underbelly of celebrity and greed.

So, welcome to the Pinnacle, Mumbai's grandest luxury skyscraper which is home to George Abercrombie an over-the-hill American actor who detests India and living under the shadow of his much younger wife – the reigning queen of Bollywood Sweety Sahota.

After a drunken-bender George wakes up in their penthouse alongside the dead body of his wife.  This gloriously twisty plot follows not only George, but his wife's compromised personal assistant and a desperate servant. Soon all three are scrambling not only to cover their tracks but to also find who really killed Sweety Sahota before the police and a rather ruthless gangster catch up with them.

In The Pinnacle Abir Mukherjee positions unsympathetic and deeply flawed protagonists under the looking glass, forcing them to confront their own greed and panic which become tools of their self-preservation.

 The Pinnacle is a thriller that examines the lives of doomed characters, separating their natures from the circumstances that they find themselves having to confront. Though undeniably dark, the narrative is striated with Mukherjee's signature wit [and biting satire] accompanied with some genuinely laugh-out-loud observations. Though beneath all this gripping, edge-of-seat tension and cinematic pacing, there is subtle social commentary on the realities of class, power, and inequality in contemporary society.

The Pinnacle reveals the author as a consummate storyteller at home with a modern day backdrop as he is with a historical one.

Highly recommended.