It'sa swashbuckling tale of Yadu, a sixteen-year-old lad getting kidnapped and tossed into the throes of death. In the year of independence when the British slur was yet lingering Yadu Ranganathan is abducted by a notorious gang to stop his father from whistle-blowing. Hardaker and Icy are two British goons with two local accomplices; Dorai and Sethu. The spine-chilling story unfolds how the horrendous criminals carried out nefarious activities under the nose of policemen and hoodwinked all and sundry.
The desperadoes hatched a gruesome master plan to hijack a railway coach that belonged to the Reserve Bank of India along with its steam engine tugged to Mangalore Express. It sounds incredulous but the story veers to prove it so. ?It'sjust vanished, all hundred tones of it?? said police inspector Kripakaran. ?The engine and the coach simply vanished?.No station in the vicinity reported seeing it?.?Robbing a coach is one thing. But hijacking a coach (along with its engine) is something else?. Were the hijackers egomaniacs or dunce heads to do such a blunder that would raise hue and cry from all quarters to get them captured? The Mafiosos were too seasoned to lay snare for themselves. It was something so intricate that even Intelligence Bureau sleuths could not work out. Yadu, though a laddie succeeds to crack the flummoxing plot with his ?piggyback theory? ? an ingenious deception of Hardaker et al. The suspense reaches its crescendo when this incorrigible jigsaw puzzle is worked out. And yet again reader confront a second climax when the criminals vanish into thin air on the brink of capture.
A yet another climax ensues in the final chapter. The chapter dovetails together the entire puzzle when yet more interesting things emerge and macabre plots are fathomed out to leave the readers gaping at the alacrity of the nefarious ongoing on such a humongous scale under clandestine cover. The story unfolds with twists and twirls at na?ve moments to send peals of utterance upon unsuspecting readers. Those tantalizing moments and travails of heaving Yadu are enough to create a riveting effect upon its readers. ?They had planned the biggest smuggling operation the world would never know about?.It was the largest consignment of ?..that had ever been lost in the history of mankind.? The author roped in Hitler, the Nazis, Winston Churchill, the Royal Navy and what not.
Like successful thriller writers, K Subramanya too tosses red herrings to jolt his readers.
The author rattles down minute details to recreate a seamless vivid tapestry of events woven around typical folklore of India for readers to find a subtlety in the story from their own experience.
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