Tarun Mehrishi is a lawyer from the National Law School in Bengaluru and a graduate of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. He has worked as a corporate lawyer with two of India’s leading law firms, as the chief operating officer for a sports marketing company in Delhi.

From working as a corporate lawyer, to heading marketing for sports brands and now being the co-founder of an EV company, author Tarun Mehrishi has worn many hats in his long successful career.

‘The Portrait of a Secret’ is his debut novel and it already has a movie in the making. The book is a fast-paced action thriller that follows two paintings across the past century to unfold a threat to the nation in the present. Though it is inspired by true events, and we see a lot of iconic historical moments in the story, the book itself is all fiction.

The book is a work of fiction, built around several real events that were front and center on the global stage at their time – be it the actual theft of two paintings from India, the accession of Kashmir, the Partition, the birth of Bangladesh or even the life of Dawood Ibrahim, to name a few, all of these events are real. It did take a fair bit of research to understand the facts and circumstances around each of the events that form the pillars around which the plots and sub-plots have been built, but Tarun says he is certainly no expert in history.