Title: Lynchpin: The Best Laid Schemes of Mice & Men
Author: Siddharth Maheshwari
Publisher: Leadstart publishing
Genre: Crime thriller, Mystery
First Publication: 2021
Language: English
Book Summary: Lynchpin by Siddharth Maheshwari
Present day India, about 1.4 Billion people, living across its twenty-nine states and seven union territories, speaking about one thousand six hundred and fifty-two different languages and followers of at least nine recognized religions stand united in the country.
A sinister plan, of a shrewd calculating mastermind, has set the wheels of doom in motion. He is now pulling the lynchpins across the country and making it fall into disarray. He is using everyone in his path to achieve his goals. Within thirty days he intends to control the nation’s soul.
As chaos grips the country, it’s a race against time for DSP Ranbir Roy of the Intelligence Bureau and Inspector Vikram Aditya Singh to stop him before anarchy dooms the country.
The pieces are set, the board is laid out but what happens when your own pawns move against you? What will be the end game?
Book Review: Lynchpin by Siddharth Maheshwari
Lynchpin by Siddharth Maheshwari is a mystery, and a thriller at times, and a detective book – but it’s also a political and economic commentary, has one of the more original and daring plot, and is invigorating in its details. It did take me awhile to get into the story, but once I did, I became engrossed in the mystery and wanted to continue reading to find out “who did it?!” and “what actually happened?”
The plot revolves around a petty thief who witnesses an impending attempt to destroy the Indian economy. The policeman who caught the thief does not believe him and dismissed it thinking that the thief was just fawning in his dying moments. Soon he dies and his death is followed by a series of catastrophic events over the next few days. Two police officers, DSP Ranbir & Inspector Vikram, take on the responsibility of stopping the collapse of the economy by hunting down the perpetrators within 30 days, starting from scratch.
Both, Ranbir and Vikram, are looking to solve the riddle of a lifetime and to uncover a mystery. Is it by chance, fate, or destiny, who knows, but somehow these two very determined and very stubborn people are brought together with this mystery to solve. I guess what really sold the book for me was that I really believed in the characters. Both of them are pretty flawed but completely believable. Siddharth Maheshwari uses investigative style of presentation and his two main characters to work in an amazing variety of potent themes into his first book.
Siddharth Maheshwari takes what seemed at the outset to be a juicy ‘locked-island-mystery plot’ and turns it first into an insightful ‘cat-and-mouse’ saga and then into a scathing political and social commentary that forces us to think about such a wide variety of themes and aspects that we normally refuse to accept as part of society. The author shove it in our faces in all its stinking ugliness for us to stop turning the blind eye at these atrocities.
Do not mistake this for a mere fictional work with imagined crimes. It has firm foundations in reality. In my opinion, the whole plot is a thin wrap-sheet thrown around the brutal truths of real crimes. Author Siddharth has extensive knowledge of the most heinous crimes and he has written extensively about them in this book. This expertise shows through in his description of such acts of unimaginable cruelty with an almost nonchalant objectivity, with a careless leaving out of the gory details and focus on the trivial aspects of the act that sends shivers down our spine. Author’s extensive knowledge about the worst forms of crime and the procedure of law allows him to give a gruesome reality to what we usually consider to be just crime fiction. He convinces the reader that it is real and all around us if we only cared enough to look.
Lynchpin by Siddharth Maheshwari is brilliantly conceived, cunningly plotted, diabolically crafted, shrewdly paced, and skillfully written. This is a very mature book, with themes that make you despair yet are handled so compassionately that you are never alienated. I also enjoyed the financial interplay and the economic commentary of the other plot line. Highly recommended.
