Abhishek Dhar is an IT Product Manager and lifelong mystery lover, first hooked by stories his elder sister Anu told him as a child. He didn't set out to write a mystery about a fire — he set out to write about something smaller and more familiar: the discomfort of a room going quiet when someone asks the one question everyone else has agreed not to ask. Years spent solving other people's problems as a product manager taught him how often the truth sits in plain sight, waiting for someone patient enough to keep asking "why" one time too many. The Thirteenth Name is his debut novel — grown out of that same restlessness: a story where four teenagers do what an entire town spent twenty-five years too afraid to do.

He lives with his wife, Madhura, and when he isn't writing or untangling product roadmaps, he can be found in the kitchen, cooking. He is already at work on Book Two.