The Fourth K

This isn’t the familiar Mafia routine with treachery and deception at every turn of the page where, presided by the silent but sure law of Omerta, the stories revolve around revenge and the sense of honour that binds syndicates. But this time the story is of politics and dictators.

When the terrorists assassinates the Pope and holds a plane full of travelers including the first daughter of the United States as hostage, it depends on one man and his staff to thwart the ploys of the terror group. Parallel to that is the threat of a mini atom bomb in the heart of the city. With all these difficulties along with the opposition and the influential Socrates club trying to oversee his every move, President Francis Xavier Kennedy finds it the ultimate challenge of his career. To know how the crisis is managed you have to go through the book but two things I can promise, one, the story is superbly orchestrated devoid of undue heroism that makes it more realistic. And two, though this is not about the underworld, but Puzo draws a clear parallel with political maneuvers that shapes nations and creates dictators. With exciting revelations of fictitious political machinery, the only disappointing is occasional lengthy introductions to characters and the subtlety of the multiple climaxes that decelerates the pace a bit.

Harano Diaryr Khonje

Bimal Kar’s detective other than Kikira, used to bore me with maybe his only appearance in the novel Harano Diaryr Khonje but for the fact that I was somewhat optimistically biased about Bimal Kar in recent days that I again took up the ebook to refresh my memory about the story which I’d once read in Anandamela. To say that it felt excellent would be not true but the adventure or the slow evolution of the plot seemed now to be so akin to traditional detective novels which I’m sure I was not matured to appreciate at my younger days. But the slowness of the pace seemed to get the better of the story and the climactic revelations that ought to be more splendid seemed not so astounding. It is more of a standard adventure story than detective but for the last two pages, where suspense was created very rapidly and there too detection never seemed a prime motive and so the readers can enjoy Kar’s easy paced storytelling but for the fans of stories involving true investigators this may not be so much of an enthusiastic choice.