Krishna
Starts weirdly and you take some time to get used to the mixture of thriller and comedy strands that come up. Once you get used to it, this is a very nice thrill ride that accelerates and takes you along for a fun filled ride. An excellent read, keeping in mind that it is a thriller meant to entertain. It even manages to educate as it goes along – at least educates the laymen – which is a very nice bonus.
A CEO of a firm, John Helms has hired the narrator Argus Ward for security detail but worries that there are lapses in it. The narrator just is back from Thailand (on a Gulf Stream belonging to the company) after supervising the details pending a forthcoming visit of John to Thailand.
However, in the private plane back, he and he alone, sees the stewardess buck naked. Everyone says she has clothes on.
When an attempt was made by a crazy girl on John Helms that was easily thwarted by Argus Ward’s men, Argus goes to meet Helms and you learn obliquely that Argus has paranoid schizophrenia kept under tight control by drugs.
Argus starts experiencing weirdness again when he sees his dead father waiting for him outside the office and tries to pursue him, much to the puzzlement of the board members who were in the midst of giving Argus a presentation!
It gets worse. Strangers tell him that John Helmes is trying to kill him and he, Argus, ought to kill John first. You wonder where the story is going. But at the end, you marvel at how deftly the author weaves the various strands of the incidents into a coherent whole and does it so well.
Suddenly Argus finds himself in an asylum and they say that he did kill someone, the implications being John Helm. The irony is that his own people guarding the house let him in as they recognized him. And apprehended him later.
The man who is a chief scientist is “also” a paranoid schizophrenic. Argus swears he took his medication and yet the medication does not show up in his blood at all. His wife behaves as if killing a person is ‘normal’ for someone ‘who did not take the medication as prescribed’ and pleads with him to find a job for a dismissed person in John Helms organization. I thought these were ramblings of a confused author, but it is in fact the work of a good plot master weaving what you think is disparate strands together into a great ending – though not a spellbinding climax.
Anyway, Argus is convinced that he has been framed by someone tampering with his medication and escapes. Having seen his old flame, he borrows clothes of her boyfriend and runs away.
He is shunned by his close friend and left on the run to live like a hobo. This gets really great after this. What is so nice is that he is a great detective and finds out that someone set up all his ‘hallucinations’. His dead father was an impersonation. Even the naked air hostess was a set up. They were switching his medication and hurrying up his schizophrenia. He learns of John Helm’s Data Mining project to keep tabs on everyone. Fantastic and, what is more, truly accurate descriptions of the Big Data project unexpected in a thriller like this.
As he gets close to his goal, he is thwarted time and again by his disease where Darth Vader and Einstein talk to him and he has auditory and visual hallucinations. In one case, he has to keep dancing to avoid his clothes being vaporized by guys from another dimension. It is pretty funny and also very tense. Your absorption into the story deepens with every passing episode until you enjoy this thoroughly and go along with the flow.
The killing of John Helms is supposed to be just a dress rehearsal for the main event – I will not reveal it so as to give away the plot but I will say that it is a corny twist in an otherwise excellent plot. Even that turns out to be a sideshow which saves the book.
At the end, the story ends with the real mastermind being apprehended and you then realize the cleverness of the story. If I had one gripe about this, it is only that there are no brilliant deductions on how they got to the real killer. It is like watching a great equation taking shape and suddenly being presented with the answer with no interim steps to show how we got there.
Nevertheless, a thoroughly enjoyable read and I would give it a 8/10 with pleasure.
– – Krishna (March 2019)