Author Abir Mukherjee, whose crime novels have previously been set in colonial Calcutta, has turned his attention to contemporary India with The Pinnacle, a satirical novel centred on a murder in a luxury Mumbai high-rise tower. The book draws on Mukherjee's own encounters with India's super-rich during his former career in mergers and acquisitions, as well as the pandemic-era mistreatment of domestic workers and the real-life Nithari killings (a notorious 2006 case in Noida involving an employer-servant relationship that shocked India). Told through the voices of three characters — a faded Hollywood actor, his American assistant, and an Indian manservant — the novel aims to expose the moral similarities between people across vastly different social strata, while also examining how both Indian and Western societies handle questions of power, belonging, and blame.