God is a Gamer - Ravi Subramanian

Yet another amazing read by Ravi Subramanian. I have started loving his books. A bit of the Jeffrey Archer and John Grisham schools of writing; I keep waiting for his books like that of Dan Brown.

The book opens with a introduction on the U.S. Government’s clampdown on online payments to Wikileaks; an intense discussion between two corporate honchos, Vijay Banga, President of Mastercard International and Joseph Saunders, the CEO of Visa International. A senior U.S. Government official gets bumped off in the next chapter and things are just warming up; Senator Gillian Tan is killed pushing FBI into a vortex of mad chase. Stanford graduates, incompetent high profile bankers turned entrepreneurs, corrupt politicians, stereotypical FBI agents (and their Indian counterparts from the CBI) and a lot of other such people battling each other. This book is rapid. Aditya runs a gaming company that is struggling to break even; Varun his son join him, and turns the fortune of the company. In India, things are taking their own course; a prominent banker dies after slipping from the rooftop of a building in the middle of a party. 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, parttime 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. The book takes you from the by-lanes of Mumbai to the beaches of Goa, to the imposing buildings in Washington to the financial capital of New York. 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.

I have always been a fan of Ravi's gripping novels and this is no exception. The book is packed with an adrenaline rush which will not let you sleep till you finish reading it. If some bits and pieces of this book leave you in awe, horrified that such things do happen, rest assured, most of the jaw dropping moments in this book have been inspired by real life events. (23 of 2020)