Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential Book 1: Good Cop, Bad Cop

Written by Saurav Mohapatra
Illustrated by Vivek Laxman Shinde, with shorts by Vinay Brahmania, Shounak Jog, Sid Kotian, Devaki Neogi and Saumin Patel
Cover by Vivek Laxman Shinde

Once, Kadam was a rising star in the ranks of the Mumbai Encounter Squad, a secret unit tasked with carrying out extrajudicial executions of wanted criminals that turned it into a business for contract killings and extortion. However the death of his pregnant wife at childbirth triggers a downward spiral that leaves Kadam a pale shadow of his former self. When Kadam is the victim of a hit-and-run that also claims the life of a street urchin, he goes into a coma for a month. After waking up, he finds a new sense of purpose and pursues the investigation into the identity of the driver on his own, when the police close the case for lack of leads. Kadam finds out that the driver was Balwan Khan, an over-the-hill Bollywood B-Movie actor. This brings him into direct confrontation with his ex-colleagues, who are now de factor gangsters in uniform and use Khan’s movies to launder their money…

A hardboiled crime-noir tale set in Mumbai and told though the eyes of Arjun Kadam, a washed-out drug-addicted ex-cop.