My Review of Bankster

The Bankster by Ravi Subramanian

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


     I bought the book hoping it would be like another corporate thriller I read some-time back called Hickory Dickory Shock by another Indian author which I quite liked. But when I saw that he also wrote a book called "I bought the Ferrari the monk sold" I became skeptical that maybe he is just another sensationalist writer.
     He turns out to be so though he is not that bad a writer. While the author is definitely a more than decent writer, the cover and description is highly misleading.It is supposed to be thriller but the whole plot is understood in the first few pages. From then on, it just goes on and on and it felt as though we are reading it second time. He needs to first learn what a thriller means before attempting one!
      It starts off as a decent thriller promising to be an international one but soon becomes a teach-yourself-about-corporate-workings book. You know it is badly edited when
1)Almost the first 30% of the book introduces so many characters and has detailed descriptions of what happens in a Bank( when it had nothing to do with the main plot point of the book)
2)the main protagonist that the blurb talks of, doesn't come till half of the book.
I understand the book is about Banking sector but when it is almost clear in the first 50 pages that the book is about money laundering done by banks, there is nothing to look forward to for the rest of the book.
    Nobody cares about the final 'twist' in the tale . It was a lame attempt to justify the 'thriller' , the book is marketed to be. On hindsight, I should have known from the title and 'also from author' list that this is another bad wannabe-thriller book. I don't understand the count down to only 48 hours when nothing significant is going to happen at the end. The build-up of it (time at the  beginning of every chapter) is as if some big nuclear war is going to happen at 00hours!

    I try reading Indian authors now and then hoping some one impresses as much as Ashwin Sangh or  Samit Basu but still yet to find such high quality writers except the mentioned two people.

Biggest strength : 'Better' at writing than many contemporary 'popular' Indian authors.
Biggest drawback : The suspense part is completely missing in the book.




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