BANKERUPT by Ravi Subramanian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Congratulations to the author for bringing in another spine chilling crime thriller in tune with expectations of his ever growing fan club across the world.
A perfect spine chilling narration of how businesses across the world can change the lives of people, in the thirst for power, prestige, money and ego and finally end up destroying so many lives of individuals and their families, forever.
Continuing the saga of the author’s banking background, Aditya Rajsinghania, the head of investment banking wing of an MNC bank Greater Boston Global Bank, along with his batchmate in college, Shivinder, enter into a dubious deal of funding a local shoe company, initially, by jacking up the profitability illegally and later facilitate a take over by an MNC shoe manufacturer, Snuggles at an astronomical price, with the help of Aditya’s father-in-law, based at Coimbatore, a shrewd businessman involved in Emu birds farming. These two guys take their own cuts for the deal.
Aditya’s wife Cirisha Narayanan, a research scholar in MIT, Boston in USA is a highly ethical and ambitious individual who mistook her husband’s motives in career before marriage but chooses to live her life through her own career in Social Psychology, with the help of her guide and mentor Michael Cardoza. In one of her research projects in India, she accidentally discovers a fact that child labor is rampant in one of the shoe manufacturing factories of Snuggles Inc, which she escalates to their Head Office in USA, that pulls of the trigger to unveil the entire money laundering activities of Aditya and his friend Shivender, as a result of which both of them lose their jobs and Aditya is forced to join her in USA, as a dependent.
Meanwhile, Michael Cardoza is in tussle with his counterpart James Deaehl, both senior academicians in MIT for the post of the Dean of the College and oppose each other in a State subject of Gun Availability and its Control in USA which is becoming a serious social problem in the country of late, backed and financed by many dangerous National agencies, MNC banks and Investment Funds. In this scuffle Cirisha, her co-research scholar Richard and Aditya get entangled, resulting Cirisha and Richard getting murdered brutally. And later Shivender. Finally, Aditya solves the murder mystery with the help of the local police with his intelligence only to escape life sentence for a highly punishable economic fraud case and lives on a sober and painful life after having lost his dear wife and a buzzing career in banking.

The author is once again successful in creating a great reading experience through logical linking of events in two far off countries with wide cultural and economic differences. However, the reader somewhere gets disconnected with the flow of events in India and suddenly pushed into a totally different social problem about Gun Control of USA.
The story finally ends with a fact depicting that even an advanced country like USA is no better than a Third World country like India when it comes to problems like crime, homicide, cheating, money laundering, black money, insecurity, Constitutional loopholes, political interference, economic frauds, scams, social injustice and discrimination across all strata of their society.


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