Ranganatham Cipher

A slab of black granite shouldn't be able to get anyone killed. But when Dr. Vaidehi Sundaresan is called in to authenticate an inscription pulled from the ruins of a Srirangam temple wall, she finds something wrong with it — a border of eighteen chiselled marks, cut with a modern tool by an ancient hand.She has seen one of those marks before. In a police photograph. Beside a body.Three killings, thirty-five months, scattered across the Cauvery Delta — a watchman, a garland-maker, a photographer who saw too many empty pedestals where bronze gods used to stand. Each death marked with a single glyph. Each glyph carved into the same stone.It isn't a signature. It's an index — a ledger in granite, tallying which sanctums have been emptied and which counterfeit gods now sit in their place.Teaming with Inspector Kathir Ponnusamy, a weary antiquities cop who has spent nine years chasing paperwork instead of proof, Vaidehi starts walking the tally backward — toward a master carver in a village called Perumkallur who has spent thirty years replacing the divine with his own image.The tally has eighteen marks. Only six have been answered. And the man holding the chisel is already counting two more names.Some inscriptions are warnings. Read this one before it reads you.