In The Name of God by Ravi Subramanian

Imprint: Penguin, India                                                                             Review by Shwetha H S
ISBN: 9780143425731

In The Name of God is Ravi Subramanian’s ninth book out of ten. He is known as the Indian Grisham of banking thrillers. True to his fame, In The Name of God is a thriller, but not completely related to banking, but is related to the treasure on which banks work.

Set in the backdrop of discovery of the hidden treasure under the Anantha Padmanabha Swamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram, In The Name of God has a team of elite jewelers and bankers working on evaluating the value of the treasure. There is also a robbery in Dubai that is linked with the bomb blast in Mumbai and in turn with the temple in Thiruvananthapuram. One by one many characters die. Remaining become suspects until they die. Some of the artifacts among the treasure are under the risk of getting stole. A few get stolen too. Police obviously gets involved. Eventually, everything falls into place and all the interlinked cases gets solved. But how are the cases solved? That is the interesting part. Read the book.

The story is too complicated in the beginning to follow as it has too many characters, but you get to know them, and forget a few too, as the story proceeds. One of the characters, Ranjit Dubey, has nothing to do in the story. Seems to be created only to bring up gold plating machine. He is not even mentioned in the rest of the story. Story paces fast in the last few chapters and does manage to hold your attention. The suspects are great but the end is kind of disappointing to me, left me meh. Most of the events towards the end of the story are made a matter of coincidence for the lack of better alternative plot progress, but is at least logical.

In The Name of God is a one-time read. I don’t even remember half of the happenings in the story, also the characters.