Title: God is a Gamer
 |
| Source- Goodreads |
Author: Ravi Subramanian
About the story:
Blurb- Aditya runs a gaming company that is
struggling to break even. A banker slips off a high-rise building, plunging to
her death. The finance minister has made some promises that he is finding hard
to keep. The LTTE has unleashed terror in America that sends the FBI on a wild
goose chase, bringing them to Mumbai.
Enter Varun, part-time drug dealer and fulltime
genius. He turns around the gaming company before disaster strikes. Meanwhile,
the investigators plunge headlong into the shady world of bitcoins and the Dark
Net, websites that only exist for illegal transactions—drugs, sex and money.
God Is a Gamer culminates in a stunning climax where money means nothing,
assassination is taught by the ancient Greeks, and nothing is as it seems.
Review:
The plot begins with an assassination of a US
Senator, Gillian Tan. Adrian Scott, FBI special agent, in charge of the
investigation cannot find any leads on who would have wanted the senator dead.
The fact that Gillian Tan was a close friend of the President mounts pressure on Adrian to find the killer.
In India, a multi-national bank, NYIB, finds
itself a victim of a phishing scandal and Swami, the head of retail banking in
the firm, fears that he may lose his job. He takes advice from his mentor and
friend, Aditya Rao. Aditya is the founder of a very successful BPO and an
emerging gaming company, Indiscape. Aditya has a very murky past but when his
long estranged son, Varun, reunites with his dad and joins his company, he is
more than happy.
Varun has grandiose plans to expand his dad’s
gaming company but unfortunately these plans don’t agree with Aditya’s friend,
Sandeep, who is also a co-founder of Indiscape. Meanwhile Varun falls in love
with Tanya, daughter of Malvika- the scheming and manipulative CEO of NYIB.
Things go haywire when NYIB comes under news again
for an ATM heist of 5 million dollars worth, where NYIB’s customer’s cards were
skimmed for data and used to make fake cards for the heist. During a party
hosted by Tanya for her mom’s birthday,
Malvika falls to her death from a high-rise building.
At the center of all this chaos is a secret
website, Cotton Trail, selling everything shady and illegal- from drugs to
pornography. The website thrives in an age of digital, virtual money
called bitcoins. Billions of transactions in bitcoins are conducted under the
cloak of an anonymous network called TOR or The Onion Router.
As the plot proceeds, each character is exposed to
reveal a hidden ulterior motive for his/her actions and corrupt intentions.
This is my first Ravi Subramanian book and all
though I had seen great reviews for his earlier books on the net, I never got
around to picking his books. So it was with much excitement that I began
reading ‘God is a Gamer’.
The beginning of the book was a little
disorienting when lots of random characters were introduced and seemingly
unrelated incidents occur in different nations. It was difficult to follow the
plot with diverse sub-plots being narrated in short chapters. But as the story
proceeded along it got more intriguing and the introduction of a covert online
website that traded in narcotics and sex was the piece de resistance.
A thriller of different kind that bodes well in
the age of digital living. A definite must-read if you like fast-paced books
and edge of the seat action.
Rating: 4/5
This review is a part of the biggest http://blog.blogadda.
No comments:
Post a Comment