Meet the Author

Amrita Verma Chowdhury is the author of Faking It, an art crime thriller about fake modern and contemporary Indian art.

She holds engineering degrees from IIT Kanpur and UC Berkeley, where she was a Jane Lewis Fellow, and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon (Tepper Business School). Her work as an engineer in Silicon Valley led to seven US patents for semi-conductor fabrication – something to show for those bad-haired days. She has done Strategy Consulting and Board Effectiveness work in the US and Australia and has spent long nights fitting five-syllable words inside two-by-two squares. She has worked in the rarefied bastions of Ivy League education bringing together ideas and people. She currently works in publishing.

She lives in Mumbai with her husband Sumit, their two children Shoumik and Aishani, and an assortment of pets including a cocker spaniel, a guinea pig and two turtles. She loves travelling, baking cupcakes with her daughter and hearing from her readers.

                          

         

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MY REVIEW: Colare. A miracle drug to cure late stage metastatic pancreatic cancer. The result of three years of research. An investment of one hundred million dollars. Slated to garner billions in revenue for pharma-giant Acel. Now was not the time for data to go awry…

With this laconic framework, Breach, by Amrita Chowdhury, takes off at the speed of light, or rather, the speed of a hacker’s cyber footprint. The action takes place across continents. In the USA, China, and Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai in India. The protagonist is the charismatic Dr Udai Vir Dhingra, who has staked his future on making the new offshore research centre in India work. He is feted by market and media, has degrees in bioengineering and business from Ivy League universities and is the Man on the Move. But it is under his watch that the data gets strangely morphed, bringing to the fore deep-rooted prejudices in the western nations against the reliability of Indian operatives. So where does the glitch originate from? Can they keep the aberrations under wrap till they can trace and fix the problem? Egos are ruffled, tempers flare, violence builds up and nothing seems safe anymore.

To make matters worse, Vir is troubled by his uneasy relationship with his American girlfriend Tracey, which is complicated further by his unexpected meeting with his first love, Diti. Diti is an idealist, an activist, a champion for the rights of the poor. Vir’s unease about his own choices and priorities are increased as she accuses him of selling his soul to a heartless corporate, and of exploiting the desperation of dying millions.

The plot races along, with just two to three pages per chapter, switching between laboratories and smelly lanes, fashion shows and college corridors. The characters jump off the page, even minor ones, with pithy descriptions of their appearances and their motivations. We see all too clearly the lure of money that can blur the moral compass of youngsters such as Raghu who convinces himself that it is okay to illegally download a new song just to make a few thousand rupees. Will his illegal activities stop there or escalate further? We have Tracey struggling to make sense of Vir’s India as she sits watching a fashion show with ‘the skinny Pammi of bouffant hair, bountiful jewellery and tufted pink Dior bag’. How can this mindless luxury be reconciled with the all-pervasive poverty, the lack of healthcare, even basic hygiene int the country? Where will Tracey find work in advanced medical research in the midst of such penury? And is her relationship something worth fighting for at all?

The ticking clock grows louder. Action picks up as cyber security experts converge on Acel to trace the source of the trouble. They struggle to track down the perpetrators who coast undetected through the anonymity of open servers, with online names like Mystic Mir, Manic16 and Malingomer. These shadow players with multiple aliases seem many levels ahead of the white hats who have fanned out to disable them. Vir’s American bosses are ready to shoot him down. The media hounds them. Acel’s stock nosedives.

How does everything get resolved? Who wins the virtual fight? Get your copy of this edgy thriller to find out how skilfully the author carries you along to the racy finish.

Breach is a smooth, sophisticated tale of espionage and mystery, laying bare the murky underbelly of a cyber world that is so dazzling on the surface. No one is safe anymore…