Breach
by
Amrita Chowdhury
My Review
This is the first cyber thriller that I have read and I must say that it’s been extremely well researched. I respect women authors absolutely. But that didn’t stop me from being surprised that it’s a woman who has written this book. My bad! Amrita Chowdhury has written one fabulous book that kept me biting my nails throughout. More than that, I skipped work one whole day, not going near my computer, as I wanted to finish reading this book. That hasn’t happened in years.
To begin with, the first fifty pages of the book kind of went above my head with a lot of “technical mumbo jumbo” in the words of protagonist Dr. Udai Vir Dhingra. It did make me wonder how I had committed myself to reviewing this book. But after that, the story began to unravel and I understood way better. From then on, I couldn’t do much else than to finish reading Breach.
The story swings between Mumbai and the USA with a couple of sequences from China as well. While a part of me rejoiced that youngsters of today, even slum-dwellers, could understand and work on the internet, it’s quite shocking how one could so easily get drawn into the murky world of cyber crime, get in too deeply to be safe.
Amrita Chowdhury’s language is crisp while the narration flows comfortably. I like brief chapters as the scenes keep changing constantly while the story is on the move. And this one sure does have the perfect ingredients to make it a Bollywood thriller.
All the characters – Vir, Rads, Peevs, Karthik, Tracey, Diti, Adam, Andy, Dr. Sandler, Raghu, Madhu, Anki, Suv, Sandman, Lee – have been fleshed out strongly. I could see the scenes unfolding in front of me while reading the book.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes to read thrillers. It’s a very good story, well narrated.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of Breach by Amrita Chowdhury through The Book Club in return for my honest review.
The Blurb
How secure are your secrets in the virtual world? Weeks before pharma-giant Acel is ready to file a global patent application for cancer wonder-drug Colare, its offshore data centre in Mumbai is hacked. The charismatic, young leader of its Indian business, Dr Udai Vir Dhingra, finds himself being blamed for negligence and breach of security. Battling market pressures, media scrutiny, livid American bosses and crumbling relationships, Vir must find the perpetrators, or see his career – and his life – spiral downwards. But the deeper he gets dragged into the shadowy world of masked online identities and muddied digital footprints, the more Vir discovers that nothing is easy or obvious, and everything has a price. Set across Mumbai, Washington and Guangzhou, Breach is a compelling and edgy cyber thriller that explores the dark and dangerous underbelly of our increasingly virtual existence
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Meet the Author
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Amrita Verma Chowdhury is the author of Faking It, an art crime thriller about fake modern and contemporary Indian art.
She holds engineering degrees from IIT Kanpur and UC Berkeley, where she was a Jane Lewis Fellow, and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon (Tepper Business School). Her work as an engineer in Silicon Valley led to seven US patents for semi-conductor fabrication – something to show for those bad-haired days. She has done Strategy Consulting and Board Effectiveness work in the US and Australia and has spent long nights fitting five-syllable words inside two-by-two squares. She has worked in the rarefied bastions of Ivy League education bringing together ideas and people. She currently works in publishing.
She lives in Mumbai with her husband Sumit, their two children Shoumik and Aishani, and an assortment of pets including a cocker spaniel, a guinea pig and two turtles. She loves travelling, baking cupcakes with her daughter and hearing from her readers.
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