Maya Sengupta has thirty-eight hundred rupees to her name, a father dying by instalments in a Calcutta hospital, and a career in the last, wheezing months of a family pharmaceutical firm that nobody will rescue. Then, thirty-nine thousand feet above Turkey, in the hushed amber light of a business-class cabin, the chief executive of London's most glittering drug company turns to her and makes an offer: a director's chair, a salary beyond her imagining, a house in Mayfair, and every debt she owes erased. The price is a single night in Frankfurt. Maya is not a fool. She names her own terms. And in doing so she steps through a door that will not close behind her. What begins as a bargain becomes a partnership, then a passion, then a conspiracy. Beneath the polished glass of Ashworth Meridian Pharma lies a secret written in the blood of the dead: a vaccine that works, on paper, only because the paper has been made to lie. As the bodies and the lies accumulate, Maya is drawn into a world of ministers and regulators, of velvet-lined hotel suites and locked laboratory vaults, where influence is bought with flesh and favour, and where loyalty is merely a longer form of betrayal. She will be adored. She will be hunted. She will be bargained for, bartered with and underestimated by every powerful man in Europe. And she will learn, in the end, the oldest law of the boardroom: that whoever holds the eighth signature holds everything. The Eighth Signature is a novel of desire and danger, of corruption on a global scale and revenge served cold, at the exact dosage required.
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