The modern thriller novel is becoming an increasingly chaotic space ever since the advent of Dan Brown’s hugely popular Robert Langdon books. Amrita Chowdhury adds a lot to this chaos in her second novel Breach, a fast paced cybercrime thriller set across various locations amidst the growing concerns over online intelligence thefts, ethical hacking and associated frauds. 

Pharma-giant Acel Corporation is working on applying for the patent of a wonder drug Colare as a cure to Cancer, when they find out that the data has gone corrupt making their plans go for a toss. With the patent filing six weeks away, the blame game starts and the obvious culprit seems to be Vir Dhingra and his team in India, which the Acel US team was always skeptical about. Vir has to handle this issue, even as his personal life is shattered with Acel and Colare data taking up all his physical and emotional reserves.  The plot also involves nerdy teenagers getting their hands unknowingly dirty by venturing into the world of hacking, seduced by its power and the voyeuristic obscurity it offers.  Despite being a fiction, the issues tackled in this book are real and perceptible, and may also sit up uneasily on our conscience if we choose to ignore them. 

The book takes quite a long while setting up the characters, behavioral quirks and their motives behind their actions, but once these are out of the way, the narration assumes a manic pace consuming the reader along the way in its chase of the culprits. The action and the narrative are quite similar to Ravi Subramanian’s God is a Gamer, with short chapters occurring across the globe. The action however happens almost entirely in Mumbai, with the Chinese and the American counterparts playing supporting roles, or bystanders. Another curious coincidence between the two books is the references to TOR (The Onion Ring) and bit coins. 

Amrita Chowdhury, also brings up a lot of hacking, internet protocols and pharmaceutical concepts in the narrative, and offers little by the way of explanation, as the pace of the novel does not allow her to deviate towards these. In that sense, it asks the reader also to step up and inform himself/herself of the things she brought up, which can also mean that these terms can be rendered, in effect, to jargon for the uninformed reader. 

However, the book’s major fallacy is that it does not do total justice to the whodunit genre. A classic whodunit, throws red herrings all along the narrative, and builds up scenarios pointing towards various suspects, only to pull the rug from under the feet of its reader with the revelation of the real culprit’s identity. In this way, it amuses the reader, who might have missed the clues that were staring at his face all along, seemingly engulfed in the narrative, or pursuing the red herrings on offer. Breach, on the other hand, picks up a classic red herring, and builds the narrative to work towards revealing the red herring to be the main culprit. Purists of the genre may shake their heads in disapproval. 

Amrita Chowdhury’s writing is functional and thankfully devoid of the grandiose, so it can be devoured in a couple of sittings. Some grammatical errors also seemed to have cropped up, and the book in general also could do with another editing session to trim it to fewer than 300 pages. 

***

PS: This book has been sent by Vivek Tejuja, who, coincidentally, is also the person who sent me Ravi Subramanian's God is a Gamer

Buy Breach from Flipkart: