The first great thriller of the year is here.

AGE OF VICE by Deepti Kapoor is a blockbuster, sprawling, brawling crime saga set in the subcontinent in the first decade of the current century.

A kind of Crazy Rich Asians meets The Godfather with a dash of Great Expectations, AGE OF VICE is flash trash with literary panache, an epic sweeping story of avarice and excess, conspiracy and corruption.

AGE OF VICE opens in New Delhi, 2004, five pavement dwellers lie dead at the side of Delhi’s Inner Ring Road. Behind the wheel of the car that killed them is Ajay. In fleet footed flashback, the author transports us to thirteen years earlier, to Eastern Uttar Pradesh with the words “What you have to remember is that Ajay was just a boy.”

From here, Kapoor descends into Dickensian detail and description of how Ajay transformed and transcended his origins, and the novel is in full spate, filled with an inundation of fact and fate, chance, happenstance and sealed destiny.

Indeed, there’s redolence of the opening of Bleak House with: It’s nineteen ninety-one and the district is in dire need. The upper caste landlords and their cronies thrive…..Ajay is poor, less than poor, shunted to the back with the other Valmikis, with the Pasis and Koris, shunned, ignored.

His odyssey is inextricably linked to Sunny Wadia, reluctant heir to the kingpin crime dynasty that controls Delhi. Designer drugs and fashion and décor camouflage the decay at his core.

He rails against the West, “You people looted us, took everything, stole our treasures. Now you look at us and say, you’re so spiritual, you have so much wisdom, you’re so wise, you’re so simple. Yeah, we’re simple, fucker. We’re simply going to destroy you.”, but is part of the towering hypocrisy of the entrenched caste system that pervades India.

Lyrical, tough, fast on the surface but with a depth and sparkle of the Koh-i-noor, AGE OF VICE grips like a vice and sustains interest for its fulsome five hundred plus pages.

AGE OF VICE by Deepti Kapoor is published by Fleet.