The first page of this book has a woman pulling a ketamine pen from her sleeve mid-fight. That tells you everything you need to know about the pace Sanjukta Nandy sets from the very beginning.

The Trojan Horse is a thriller that does not waste your time. It drops you straight into the action, keeps you there, and gives you just enough breathing room to care about what happens next.

STF19 is a covert unit based in Raipur. Their job is to track arms and drug trafficking in Chhattisgarh. One night, Manish, the team's tech head, intercepts a coded transmission from LalTara, a dangerous criminal outfit hiding somewhere in the Abujmarh forest. The message mentions RED, a stolen Russian weapon prototype that has been off the radar for months. It is apparently about to be handed over, and the drop is happening close to home. What follows is a race to decode the transmission, locate the drop, and intercept it before LalTara disappears back into the jungle. The mission is time-sensitive and, critically, unauthorised. If it goes wrong, everyone's jobs are on the line.

But the novel is not just set in 2025. It also moves back to 1997, to the origins of LalTara and to a younger Rakesh Srivastava, who once went undercover inside the outfit for three years. Those chapters explain how this became personal, and they make everything that happens in the present hit harder.

One of the strongest things about this book is its setting. Abujmarh, the forest where LalTara has been hiding for decades, is described as terrain so dense that it does not even have a revenue map. Surveys have been attempted since the British era and have failed. Even with modern technology, no one has been able to chart it fully.

Nandy writes about this place with real weight. The jungle is not just a backdrop. It is the reason LalTara has survived so long. It swallows people and makes every operation harder and more dangerous than it should be. The book makes you feel the isolation and the difficulty of trying to fight a war in terrain that cannot be found.

The wider world of STF19 is also well drawn. It all feels grounded and specific. The novel moves between two timelines, 1997 and 2025, and Nandy handles this quite well. The past chapters give the story its emotional depth. The present chapters drive the plot forward. Neither one overstays its welcome, and by the time the two connect fully, the stakes feel genuinely high.

The writing is crisp. Action sequences are clear and quick. The code-breaking scene, where Manish cracks a critical encryption after a passing comment from a peon about eating lunch in the wrong order, is one of the most enjoyable moments in the book.

 It is funny, it is clever, and it moves things along without feeling contrived.

Good thrillers keep you turning pages. Great ones make you care about what is on those pages. The Trojan Horse does both. It is also, refreshingly, a thoroughly Indian book. The world it depicts, the geography, the institutions and the way people talk and operate, feels real and specific. This is not a Western thriller with Indian names. It is its own thing entirely.

If you enjoy thrillers, this one is well worth your time.

Read more by ordering your copy here.