This is the second book in the Liam Devlin series and the story timeline is the cold war period. The British secret service needed the services of Liam Devlin and one of the other X-IRA operative Martin Brosnan to assassinate another X-IRA operative turned terrorist. Martin Brosnan was jailed in a french prison so the first task was to get him freed from there. This part itself turned out to be a thrilling and gripping part. After Martin was freed up before he and Devlin could proceed further towards their intended target, the target found them and injured both of them before kidnapping Martin’s girlfriend, who was also a well known photographer. Then the chase followed and the target was eliminated, but by this time there was still about 10% of the book left, so I was wondering what next and was really pleased to see what comes up next (which I am not going to tell as I do not want to reveal the climax).

A very simple story line – a typical in the spy-thriller types genre, yet very effectively written. The book keeps you griped through out. 3 out of 5 is my rating for this book.

The Eagle Has Landed is a second world war fiction written by Jack Higgins. The author has done some historical research and tried to present the story as if it has already happened. The plot is towards the end of second world war when Hitler was desperate for a victory and big blow to the allies. He wanted abduction or assassination of Winston Churchill.  The action was planned by Himmler and executed by the paratroopers of Germany. However, things started to go wrong and Churchill was saved.

I have read second world war fiction after a long long time and really liked it. The language and writing style are simple and there is no unnecessary descriptions anywhere. The story moves very fast and is able to continuously build the interest of the readers.

This book is a real page turner, from the first page itself I was finding it difficult to resist finishing this in one go. I have read almost all of the books by Matthew Reilly and this is the best so far. Reilly has written quite a good number of books which can be classified under historical fiction. Temple is one such book where the author has taken a plot based on the fictions historical account of of Incan empire. He has beautifully fitted Nazis (or Neo Nazis) into the plot along with some of the elements causing civil unrest in the USA.

In this book along with Spanish, Incan, American and Germans, there is one special being also. This special being is an animal from the Cat family and is called Rapa.

This is an action packed book and a very fast paced. Happy Reading.

Business Doctors is a debut book by Sameer Kamat, who is the founder of a top MBA admissions consulting firm and also writes about book publishing in India.

The story line is uniquely based around using the principles of management in underworld. Yes you read it right, “underworld”.

For the folks in the underworld, the illegal work they do is business for them. And like every business there are ups and downs there also. While the business is on a downside it  may need help from business consultants, who are supposed to indicate the gaps in processes, people and revenue lines and potentially suggest remedial action items.

This book revolves around WFB a.k.a Woody Family Business which is running from three generations and is now seriously impacted by the recession and entry of new players (or so the boss thinks). He called in a consultant Schneider to help him revive his business. Schneider understands the business and presents the gaps in the same and also help Mr Woody hire appropriate talent by helping them in breaking the jail and thus spending 6 million dollars in the process. Angie, wife of Mr Woody played a very important part in all this action.

Overall the storyline was one of a kind, with a simple writing style and keeps the reader interested throughout. There was a place where I felt the sentence had a typo (don’t remember the page number though, but a grammar check in word processing software should pick that up). And I must say the climax was something which came as a little surprise to me. While the author has taken his time for various phases in the story line, the last 20 or so pages demanded a little bit more and the climax could have been wrapped up nicely. I was feeling that something was missing when the book came to a sudden end. The cover design and fonts could have been a little better and catchy.

Disclaimer – I received a review copy from the author and my review is not biased by that fact.