Paydirt is a literary crime/thriller that features a senior Pakistani civil servant with a nose for self-enrichment who encounters international intrigue and is forced to come to terms with his past when he investigates an underaged female traffic fatality doctored to prevent scandal for a powerful cult leader . Paydirt is set in 1980s Pakistan when the CIA teams with Afghan mujahideen t o fight a proxy war with the Soviets, the unlikely investigation becomes obsession as the story explores themes of justice and identity along the mountainous borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan, in the fabled Anarkali Bazaar of Lahore , the forbidding swamps alongside the Indus River, and a lonely shrine in the sweltering Thar desert. Paydirt explores a society striving to escape the colonial past that haunts it. The young man who flees the accident and runs to join the mujahideen when threatened by the henchman doctoring the site of the traffic accident, like the senior civil servant whose father died defending the British in Burma , is symbolic of his society and will undoubtedly be viewed with sympathy by readers as he flees the sinister forces that pursue him. If he represents the vibrant promise of a better future, his shocking fate will be a stark reminder of bitter geopolitical realities .