The Clockwork Pulse

In the rain-soaked streets of Chennai, where the past whispers through the hum of the present, a single tick can mean the difference between life and death. Inspector Daniel Jerald—Dani to those who know his unyielding resolve—has built his career on control, cracking cases with a precision that borders on obsession. But when a watchmaker named Hari Kumar is found dead in Parrys Corner, his heart burst and a pocket watch ticking in his rigid hand—stopped at midnight—Dani’s world begins to unravel.

The deaths multiply—Shreya Nair, Kannan Rajan—each marked by a silver watch, its crescent-and-dots symbol a cryptic signature, its tick a harbinger of doom. As the body count rises, Dani and his rookie partner, Varun, chase a killer that isn’t human: a shadow of gears and darkness, born from the Triplicane clock tower, its hands frozen at midnight, its hum a pulse that kills. The tower, a relic of the 1890s, hides a secret buried by Ashok Venu, a watchmaker from the ‘50s whose experiments with time turned deadly—a pulse that marks the worthy and stops the weak, a pseudoscience nightmare Dani must unravel with hard evidence.

With midnight looming as his own deadline, Dani races against the tick-tick-tick of a force that knows his name, wielding a broken key that could lock the pulse—or unleash its final strike. In a city where every second counts, The Clockwork Pulse plunges into a battle of precision versus chaos, science versus the impossible, and a detective’s will against a terror that winds tighter with every heartbeat. Will Dani stop the pulse before it claims him, or will midnight mark his end?