One man hiding in Sagramanda is the scientist Taneer Buthlahee. He has two problems. The first is that he has stolen a genetic-engineering secret worth billions from his former employer, a powerful and extremely motivated multinational corporation. To recover this secret, it has hired the discreet Euro-Indian operative, Chalcedony "Chal" Schneemann, who never fails. Chal doesn't want to kill Taneer, but, if it becomes necessary, he won't hesitate to do so. And he knows Taneer is in Sagramanda.

Taneer's second problem is that he has fallen in love with an Untouchable. His beloved, Depahli De, is a highly intelligent and astonishingly beautiful woman who is unswervingly loyal to Taneer. But none of this matters to Taneer's upper-caste family, because his relationship with an Untouchable defiles them all. To redeem the family honor, Taneer's father, Anil Buthlahee, has come to Sagramanda with one goal: to kill Taneer. And Anil, like Chal, is converging on Taneer and Depahli ... as are the police, the expatriate serial killer and the man-eating tiger.

Science fiction discovers a new world

India is one of the largest countries on Earth, and it has the second-largest population. It has the most English speakers of any nation. Its ancient, complex civilization stretches back over 4,000 years and has birthed several world religions. It has influenced Western civilization since at least the days of Alexander the Great. It combines cutting-edge technology and near-Stone-Age villages, ultramodern highrises and millennia-old ruins. It has appeared in English-language literature from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books to Paul Mann's George Sansi mysteries. This grand, diverse, contradictory subcontinent is as ideal a setting for science fiction as SF favorite Japan. But India almost never appears in SF by Westerners.

Now, New York Times best-selling author Alan Dean Foster has set his novel Sagramanda in near-future India—specifically, in the titular city, a fictional analog of Kolkata/Calcutta. Like India, Foster's novel spans a vast socioeconomic range, from the street people who aspire to leave gutter for sidewalk to the well-paid Euro-Indian operative in his five-star hotel, and from the middle-class Sikh police inspector hunting the expatriate serial killer to the poor ex-villager who sells trinkets—and drugs—to foreign tourists. Though Sagramanda has a large and challenging cast—seven major and numerous minor characters, nearly all Indian—American author Alan Dean Foster gives his characters depth and keeps them true to their cultures and histories. And, wisely, he makes one of his major characters India.

Sagramanda is a near-future techno-thriller. Whether techno or mundane, thrillers often bloat toward (or past) the 1,000-page mark. Sagramanda could use some pruning of redundant words, but it is still trim and taut at less than 300 pages. Any reader seeking a genuinely fast and exciting techno-thriller should grab Sagramanda. Of course, this categorization will make many SF fans suspicious of the book, because SF commonly shows technology changing the world, while the techno-thriller commonly shows the world preventing technological change. But Sagramanda is true SF: Taneer's stolen biotechnology changes the world, and in a most unexpected fashion.