Omar Hamid joined the Pakistani police vowing revenge after a hit man executed his father. Having left the force 12 years later, the Taliban murdered his replacement — the man who had arrested his father's killer and become his best friend. The two gritty, electrifying novels Hamid has published since are packed with versions of the underworld characters he met as he rose to become a top counter-terrorism cop in the bowels of one of the world's roughest cities, Karachi. The damp alleys and grandiose mansions of Pakistan's sweltering, ultra-violent megacity are home to 20 million people. Among them move Taliban insurgents buying arms from gangsters, drug traffickers striking heroin deals, kidnappers, hit men and mafia dons.

"Fiction gives you a lot of license - you can say a lot of hard truths," Hamid says wryly. That means plots driven by smooth, sinister military officers, self-doubting cops, or hit men hiring themselves out to mafia-like political parties; like the man convicted and hanged this year for killing Hamid's father. Hunting such men was an obsession when he joined the force, he says.

"One of the best days was when we caught a guy ... he was a former police officer who had been involved in the target killings of police officers (involved in political cases). He worked with a hit team ... We were after him for something like six months or so, and in that period, police officers kept dying," Hamid recalled.

Hamid's background as the son of a senior civil servant, educated at one of the country's top schools and British universities, made him an unlikely recruit for Pakistan's embattled and much maligned police force. Like his police protagonists, ordinary men struggling to find their peace within a corrupt system, he sometimes seems like a genteel outsider in a world that can be brutal, as a few gruesome torture scenes reveal. But the education that set him apart also gave him a voice, he said.

"The police is chock-full of amazing stories. The best scriptwriter in Hollywood would not come up with something this good ... but its a world (where) we don't give access to outsiders," he said.