Book Review: The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping by Keigo Higashino

'The Name of the Game is Kidnapping' is another one of Higashino's upturned-plot crime thrillers, told from the view of the criminal. All the other Higashinos I have read were about murders (including 3 unread ones in my Kindle shelf), so I decided to try this book for a change of pace.

The book is true to Higashino's form - a slow burning thriller wherein a set of regular everyday people indulge in crime. However, for the man who set the bar for crime thrillers with 'Salvation of a Saint' (arguably his best book) and 'Suspect X', 'The Name of the Game is Kidnapping' is a lukewarm read. It is in about the same class as the author's 'Malice', which again was a good but far from great read.

Strictly an airport read.

Book Review: The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

Ever since I was very young, I have been fascinated by radioactivity. Moore's "Radium Girls" takes one back to the time Radium was just discovered (early 20th century) and there was little known about the deleterious radioactive impact of Radium. In fact, doctors often prescribed Radium for 'good health', there were Radium foods and knick-knacks sold and it was thought of as a wonder-chemical.

'Radium Girls' is the story of women working in two particular radium-dial painting (watch dial) factories/ studios in the US who later suffered the ill-effects of radium-poisoning. Knowing what we know of radioactivity today, it was hard not to wince when I read parts of the book where the women employees played with Radium, took it home to paint their houses or other items in it or dipped the brushes they used to paint the dials in their mouths to 'point' them for more defined results while painting. The book takes one through the wonder-years of Radium to the women inevitably falling extremely sick to their judicial battle (some from deathbeds) against the companies that employed them.

This is a harrowing read and not for the faint of heart. 'Radium Girls' is an essential warning about the embrace of new technology/ chemicals without substantial research. I have no doubt that more than a hundred years on from the discovery of Radium, there are undiscovered Radiums that poison the human race (plastics, cola drinks, telecommunication airwaves) and in that, the book is a doubly chilling read, especially when one reads of the machinations of the businesses to deny allegations of harm.

What irked me was that the book seemed to end somewhat abruptly though Moore does provide an Epilogue that ties up loose ends. Even so, Radium Girls was an enjoyable if somewhat bone-chilling read.

Book Review: NDTV Frauds by Sree Iyer

While in many ways an eye-opener about the machinations of the men behind the massive scams at NDTV, 'NDTV Frauds' is a nerve-grating read. Iyer descends often into repetition and offers very little actual proof for the government/ ministerial backing of the channel, except for strong circumstantial evidence. The premise itself is strong and perhaps required a much better author than Iyer's ilk to write a book on. In the hands of a better author/ journalist (think 'Gujarat Files'), this book would have been an excellent read. In Iyer's hands, it is a shadow of a book, even though it does have eye-opening revelations about the workings of the Lutyens Delhi journalist-bureaucrat-politician nexus that benefited the Roys so much.

Book Review: The Accused (Modern Plays) by Jeffrey Archer

'The Accused' is a play authored by Archer, and in that, I believe it is a disservice to read it. Even so, considering I am highly unlikely to encounter it being performed in my lifetime, I purchased the somewhat overpriced Kindle edition, coming off a highly enjoyable 'Tell Tale' from the same author. The premise of a play that allowed the audience to decide the fate of the protagonist as a jury, also seemed interesting enough to read at least once. The book/ play ends with two potential endings depending on whether the audience/ jury finds him guilty or innocent.

I happened to find a couple of narrative plot holes which bugged me a lot. Archer excels in the interplay of strongly etched characters and the play format where the narrative is carried forward more by dialogue and less by, well, narrative, isn't something Archer is best suited for.

Even so, I didn't mind the faults of the book much. 'The Accused' is enjoyable enough, though it stops short of being an Archer masterpiece.

Book Review: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

'Exit West' was another book I was uncomfortable about picking up, given that I didn't enjoy Hamid's 'Reluctant Fundamentalist' much. Even while the book itself had a very interesting story to tell (Reluctant Fundamentalist, that is), I found the narrative device Hamid used to be extremely amateurish.

In 'Exit West', Hamid uses another narrative device - this time, using a narrative style that mirrors the randomness of the lives of migrants running from war and yet often, running into violence and hate. I was floored by 'Exit West' and quite simply, hadn't expected to enjoy the read so much. Poetic yet pacy, Hamid manages to keep you invested in the lives and the love story of his protagonists from start to finish even as their canvas keeps changing.

'Exit West' is a moving ode to every refugee from every war, ever.

Essential reading.

Book Review: The Dirty Dozen: Hitmen of the Mumbai Underworld by Gabriel Khan

I was skeptical about Gabriel Khan's second book considering the first one from the author was the highly dubious Mumbai Avengers (converted into a far more dubious movie later - Phantom). However, Zaidi remains my weakness and having read the preface which alluded to Khan's work with Zaidi, I bought the full book hoping some of Zaidi's skill would have rubbed off on "Khan" ("Khan" is apparently a pseudonym).

I needn't have worried. 'The Dirty Dozen' is a pacy thriller about the lives of the henchmen we don't often read about or remember. Khan's narrative style is similar to Zaidi's - often written in a fly-on-the-wall style. In many ways, this book tied up a lot of loose narrative ends for me in my head across all of Zaidi's works and also helped me understand where the fact for the fiction on which movies such as Daddy, Company, the Shootout series, the Sarkar series, etc. originated; needless to say, the real stories were far more interesting.

In places, Khan jumps the gun, revealing sometimes too soon the eventual fate of the hitman/ henchman, even while his story is in the midst of unfolding. Even so, 'The Dirty Dozen' was a great read to end 2017!

Book Review: Tell Tale by Jeffrey Archer

There are authors, and then there are Gods - writers of fates and histories and then, there is Archer.

'Tell Tale' has Archer in sublime form. I have often felt the short story was the best format for Archer - he is, in cricketing parlance, more a T20 player than a Test player. And what best way to flex the writing muscle in full display than to write two 100-word stories with a beginning, a middle and an end.

There are inevitably stories that miss their mark but if there is one book that captures what Archer does best, it is this.

Do not miss!

Book Review: The Making of Don by Krishna Gopalan

'The Making of Don' is a stop and start book - interesting in parts - but often repetitive and non-linear. Additionally, Gopalan has just the one source: Chandra Barot and the book relies heavily on Barot's reminiscences. I thought Gopalan might have been better served writing the story from Barot's perspective instead of as an author researching the book.

Even so, the kernel of the story is interesting enough - a movie made over several years, on a non-existent budget relying largely on goodwill and fortune to get made. It was the core story that kept me hooked even though Gopalan kept losing my attention.

Though short of the benchmark for movie-making books ("Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron", "Sholay-the Making of a Classic"), can be read as a one-off airport-read.

Book Review: Autobiography of a Mad Nation by Sriram Karri

I read Sriram Karri’s Autobiography of a Mad Nation and wondered if something was wrong with me. The book has apparently been longlisted for the MAN Asian Literary Prize. And I suffered through most of it.

The book begins with a rant a few pages long, which has the sort of putrid vile hatred which makes you wonder how the author was wronged really. It then goes directly to a scene where the President of India begins to discuss an eight page letter from one of the protagonists. The letter is long winding and you wonder why the President did not find his senses wandering off (like your senses).

And thus, Karri puts the reader off right at the start with a rant that is vile (and somewhat senile) without having the kind of style that Roy (Arundhati) brings to makes rants readable. And then he goes straight to a section so implausible that he loses you. The President of India is reading an eight page letter and you feel like asking – does the President of India has nothing better to do? Also somehow the President of India has contacts with an intelligence officer who then begins to investigate the contents of the letter – which again seems jarring; doesn’t seem to be plausible again. To make things difficult, Karri’s Mad Nation goes into rant mode ever so often, making you trudge, really trudge slowly. The rants are not stylish, witty – contrast it with Adiga’s decidedly above average (at best) White Tiger (which happened to win a Booker!) – and even then, they pale.

It is a shame that Karri populates the beginning of the book with what reads like his own frustration (I never commiserated with the rants, even though I mostly agree with the content of these rants) and that the plot right at the beginning becomes implausible, because the book is readable thereafter. I enjoyed the references to history – Emergency, Godhra, etc. But the rants kept coming back and putting me off.

It just feels like Karri could have set this book in a fictional nation – maybe made it a 1984 – to justify the implausibilities. Or, written with the style and chutzpah necessary to carry such a heavy topic off. But the book has neither – neither style nor a big blue canvas that extends beyond Karri’s hatred (that’s what the book reads like, pardon me!).

Autobiography of a Mad Nation is promising… but could have been so much better in the hands of someone like Arundhati Roy.

Book Review: Fraudster by R. V. Raman

Fraudster is R. V. Raman’s first book – a thriller set in the corporate/ financial sector. The premise of the book is the prevalence of NPAs (Non Performing Assets) in a large number of financial institutions and the myriad schemes and machinations involved therein.

The core strength of Raman’s book is that the plot is quite realistic and believable. What I found most interesting was the ingenious ways in which businessmen in India are looting banks via mortgage frauds. It is only in India perhaps that with the right amount of political backing and street smarts, you can get away with thousands of crores of fraud. (Think a certain high profile husband of a famous political dynasty scion.)

What Raman has is a deep insight of how the financial sector works and how fraud works in the financial sector. There are perhaps a couple of paragraphs in the book that might be difficult for the lay reader to understand (this reviewer having worked for over four years in the banking sector understood them easily) but that would be a minor hiccup in an otherwise good book.

Where the book falls short somewhat is (most likely) primarily due to Raman’s lack of experience as a writer. There are far too many characters in the book to keep pace with and even though you remember most of them, some of them shall inevitably slip from your attention. This wouldn’t be a problem if these characters weren’t later, relevant to the plot. It is perhaps only Agatha Christie who could somehow make us remember twenty plus myriad characters in her books. Also, there are a couple of scenes in the book that are somewhat cheesy; a fight sequence between gun toting men and an unarmed young man is especially hard to swallow.

But what keeps the book going is its frenetic pace. Action flows thick and fast and literally everybody is a suspect, which makes the book eminently readable.

Fraudster is a surprisingly good whodunit from a newbie author. Recommended.