God is a Gamer by Ravi Subramanian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another block buster from the John Grisham of India, Ravi Subramanian. A banker and a writer by profession, Ravi has once again successfully brought out a deadly crime thriller, the story spanning over two most powerful democracies of the world.

Storyline: It starts with the stories of two powerful families based in India and USA. Both of them so powerful that they can influence Government decisions and used to siphon off huge public money into their personal accounts using the underworld illegal trade activities and technology. Aditya Rao, proprietor of a BPO unit in India having New York International Bank as its client runs into trouble when its internal system is hacked by some unknown techies resulting in its customers losing huge sums of money from the ATMs in USA. While investigating this case, the FBI trips on another interesting case that unearths a BITCOIN scandal (a kind of free virtual currency used as an alternative to existing currencies in the world) being used to traffic drugs, arms, child pornography etc on a undetectable email network called Cotton Trail, hosted by parent server TOR, somewhere in Ukraine. The founder of this Cotton Trail/BITCOINS, Gillian Tan, also a senator in US Government gets eliminated by his co-founder cum room mate, who happens to be a young, clever, talented, sex-starved Tanya, the only daughter of the CEO of NYIB India. FBI with the help of Indian CBI traces down the roots of both the cases and finds a common link, eventually. The final conclusion reveals that all the game is masterminded by Aditya’s son Varun, who happens to be the boy-friend of Gloria, daughter of Senator Gillian as a revenge on behalf of his girl friend and in-order to retrieve all of Gillian’s accumulated bitcoins to become one of the youngest billionaires of the world. He goes un-traced by both FBI and CBI, despite their most employed tech savvy investigation method, while Tanya gets arrested after being cleverly exposed by Varun in a game of love.

Pros: The beautiful talent of the writer to start off his books with two different unrelated stories and end up with clever linkage of the two with lot of surprising twists and turns remains the strength of this book too. The kind of research that the author has put in to bring out the concept of BITCOINS into the world for the first time is simply un-matched. Every reader of this book would be exposed to the dangerous corporate financial scandals of today and the roots of such scandals which often are nothing else but the extensive greed of the top brass to amass huge wealth beyond their capacities coupled with their physical lusts that lead to the disasters in the end. Its like falling in their own ditches. One would get a feeling that the top management of the financial world or for that matter, any industry is full of explicit relationships and unquenchable thirst to amass wealth that would finally pull them down and finally put an end to their lavish lives, once it crosses a desired limit.

Cons: The intelligent escape of the prime culprit escaping the punishment in the end seemed to be unjustified to me. Though Varun’s actions were based on a revenge on the step-father of Gloria (Gillian Tan), his deeds have resulted in deaths of several innocent lives, who were not at all connected to the scandals. He should have been brought to justice. The author’s question “IS REVENGE A CRIME? “ can be answered with a YES if the revenge was filled with the birth of several other revenges in return.

My rating is 4 out of 5


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