The Dividend of Lies

Sarah Chowdhury has built her career on a simple principle: if the numbers do not agree, there is a reason. When her father suffers a devastating stroke, the discrepancy she cannot ignore is inside her own family.

Sir Haris Chowdhury is in hospital and unable to speak. His company, Hand and Anchor Group, is approaching a major stock-market listing. His wife, Yasmin, is determined to keep control of what happens next. His son, Zayd, the company's chief financial officer, is carrying problems of his own.

And Sarah has been away from the family for ten years.

A counter-fraud auditor by profession and temperament, Sarah returns to the Hampstead house where she grew up and begins doing what she knows how to do: reading records, checking figures and noticing what other people have learned not to see.

What begins with missing papers and uncomfortable questions leads through charity accounts, an offshore company, a multimillion-pound licensing arrangement and the carefully constructed financial story behind a public listing. The deeper Sarah goes, however, the harder it becomes to separate the corporate record from what has happened inside her own family.

Hospital records. Pharmacy documents. Dates. Numbers. The things people say because they are technically true, and the things they choose not to say at all.

As investigators, lawyers and regulators begin creating records of their own, Sarah discovers that establishing what happened is not the same as making anything right. Every piece of evidence has consequences, and the pursuit of truth can implicate the person pursuing it as surely as the people she is investigating.

The Dividend of Lies is a literary financial and legal thriller about fraud, family loyalty, institutional power and the dangerous distance between what can be proved and what can be repaired.

For readers drawn to intelligent, psychologically precise suspense in which documents, language and moral choices can be as consequential as any act of violence.