When the djinn king Melek Ahmar wakes up after millennia of imprisoned slumber, he finds a world vastly different from what he remembers. Arrogant and bombastic, he comes down the mountain expecting an easy conquest: the wealthy, spectacular city state of Kathmandu, ruled by the all-knowing, all-seeing tyrant AI Karma. To his surprise, he finds that Kathmandu is a cut-price paradise, where citizens want for nothing and even the dregs of society are distinctly unwilling to revolt. Everyone seems happy, except for the old Gurkha soldier Bhan Gurung. Knife saint, recidivist, and mass murderer, he is an exile from Kathmandu, pursuing a forty-year-old vendetta that leads to the very heart of Karma. Pushed and prodded by Gurung, Melek Ahmer finds himself in ever deeper conflicts, until they finally face off against Karma and her forces. In the upheaval that follows, old crimes will come to light and the city itself will be forced to change.

In this standalone follow-up to the fan favorite The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday Saad Z. Hossain continues to mix futurism with fable, and shows how strange our lives might become. While Gurkha introduced us to the techno utopia of Kathmandu, Kundo takes us to Hossain’s native Bangladesh, to the fading city of Chittagong, which is slowly crumbling into the sea as even Karma goes silent. But Kundo’s contemplation of his dying city is interrupted when his wife leaves him and then goes inexplicably missing, and soon Kundo starts to connect the dots between a number of disappearances. But this is Hossain, and so there’s more afoot than techno shenanigans. Kundo will find that the veil between worlds is paper-thin, and the djinn have their own stake in the matter. Filled with enough ruminations on tea and coffee to wake anyone up, this mystery/fantasy/science fiction/myth is a genre-breaker with something for everyone to love.