Expected a movie, ended up watching a documentary.
Wait. Before the book, I first have to say what I want to say about the Juggernaut app. I hate it. Absolutely hate it.
The concept of reading entire books on mobile phones itself is stupid. Ok, I know people who do and I use my Kindle app on all my devices, but the design on this app is so annoying that it makes me want to throw my phone out of the window in frustration. You scroll to read. Scroll down page by page, line by line to read a book that might run into a million pages. You read five pages like this and end up with a headache and all wonky eyed. Oh, it doesn’t even scroll down page by page. It just scrolls. Like line by line or whatever, with only the page number to tell you whether you are on the same page or yaayy you’ve turned the page. Even apps like Pocket I use for longreads have the page flip option. The Kindle app on my laptop scrolls, but one roll of the mouse= one page. THAT IS HOW YOU READ A BOOK. PAGE BY GODDAMN PAGE.
And the thing doesn’t sync across devices, so you have to scroll down right to where you left off if you continue to read somewhere else. (Edit: It apparently does. Or something) And when you pull down the screen to change the brightness or check notifications you end up pulling a few lines down too. Bloody annoying app. Oh, there seems to be some kind of clique and air kissing that happens with the Juggernaut people on social media, so everyone is all ohwow ohcool ohbrilliant about it. Because of this they get defensive when you give them feedback. Whatever. Here’s my review of your app: It sucks.
I first downloaded the app on my huge inch screen phone because free books, but threw the app in the garbage bin after attempting to read something. So when I bought Andaleeb Wajid’s Will the Oven Explode last year, I made her send me a version I could use on the Kindle. I then decided that I should only buy books on this idiotic app only if I know the author and can get a decent version of the book to actually read like a normal human being.
But then yesterday I thought I’d give it another try because new huger inch phone and I bought this book. The app is still as annoying as it was, but I forgive it this time because the book was good. Well, I won’t actually call it a book. A longlongread maybe, but it was a good read. Not great though.
Like I’ve said before, the unDorked version of Sidin is something I enjoy reading. His Deja View column was something I loved. And now this new genre seems to be a thing to look forward to and I hope he writes more pieces like this one, but if they are going to be books, I would expect a little more zing in them.
An immigrant running a shady business and his family that vanishes without trace, a drug lord out from prison, a woman the drug lord is obsessed (?) with and a brother who is determined to find out what happened to his sister… the perfect ingredients for a quickie crime novel or even a movie, but somehow the narration seemed to be too in-between. Everything started off on a very interesting note, but tapered off without much meat. Each chapter seemed disjointed and left a lot of loose ends without proper closure.
What was so special in Belinda Brewin that made him seek her out after five years? The chapter is titled Moll, but there seems to be nothing ‘molly’ about her and the opening lines of the chapter do absolutely nothing to establish anything about her character. It is just a piece of information. Why was Amarjit Chouhan tortured so much? There is nothing in the description of Regan’s character that explains the reason behind him being such a cold blooded killer. It also made me wonder about how stupid the police could be to be mislead to something as lame as the Newport Pig meeting and even more stupid to have missed that crucial piece of evidence (which in itself makes me wonder how it was even possible for a piece of paper like that to have survived seawater). Were his khat connections investigated? Has Onkar Verma got closure?
Anyway.
What this book seems to be is a compilation of several news items that have been pieced together to form a narrative. DailyMail has bits and pieces over the years with pictures of the killers and the killed in classic DailyMail style. And the tl;dr version is available on Murderpedia ( my current favourite pedia).
So until Bollywood makes a movie out of this, let’s make do with what we have.
The Book Story 