Karan Mahajan's third novel, The Complex, opens with a murder that has already destroyed a family's reputation. Laxman, the shifty, crude and charismatic patriarch of the Chopra clan, was killed 25 years before the book begins. The stain on this once-respectable Punjabi family remains.

The man who did it, Laxman's nephew Brij, has served his jail time and is about to be released. Some relatives think Brij is too dangerous, and too shameful, to return to the family home. His son Mohit decides the pair will live together — and rewinds the clock to tell the story of the decades leading up to the crime.

The result is at once a grand sweep through history and a domestic novel of petty differences. This tale of corruption and betrayal is packed with drama.

Mahajan's warmly received first two works, Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs, explored individual lives alongside larger forces — urban development in the former, a car bomb's traumatic aftermath in the latter. His excellent third novel has Delhi at its heart, but also visits Indian villages and cities, the American midwest and London. Its short chapters flit between different members of the Chopra family.

The reading experience builds by degrees. You start by nodding in appreciation at Mahajan's observant character portraits. Before you know it, you're waist-deep in frustration, corruption and betrayal, as the book ranges through politics, faith, migration, infidelity and entrepreneurship.

The Complex confirms Mahajan's move from promising stylist to assured chronicler of families under pressure, and marks him as a novelist whose scope now spans three continents.