Hamza: The Unknown Gunmen - a novel (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798186455820)

For seven years, a man carried three names across a border that officially didn't allow him to exist. When he was finally killed, the world called it what it always calls these deaths: unknown gunmen.

He was the thirty-fourth.

Hamza - The Unknown Gunmen follows three people who live in the space around a killing nobody will claim. In Gurugram, an intelligence officer builds profiles he's forbidden to see the end of - and discovers, too late, what it costs to stop asking where they go. In Karachi, a journalist spends four years turning a list of names into a pattern no government will admit exists. In Srinagar, a woman who lost her brother to a border and a cause nine years ago finally finds a thread worth pulling - one that may lead to an answer or to one more name on the list.

Woven between their stories are the real, documented case files of the men behind this haunting phenomenon - the actual killings, the actual silence, the actual diplomatic non-answers that have followed for years.

This is a novel about the architecture of deniability: how modern states conduct wars they will never acknowledge and what it costs the people - operatives, journalists and families - who live closest to the parts nobody will explain. It does not resolve the question at its center. It insists, instead, that the silence itself deserves an answer.

A literary thriller for readers of The Constant Gardener, Homeland and narrative nonfiction that reads like fiction - grounded in real, ongoing events and told with the moral seriousness they demand.