Balaji's Thots

Aside from the Lincoln Rhyme books, Jeffery Deaver pens another series that stars Kathryn Dance, an interrogator and body language expert working for the CBI. XO is the third book in that series. The earlier novels featuring Dance weren’t quite as gripping as the Rhyme books but had good stories, some unexpected twists and interesting [...]

After Think of a Number and Shut Your Eyes Tight, John Verdon became my new favorite author with his knack of creating absorbing, intriguing puzzles and unravelling them in logical yet surprising ways. But those characteristics are not in much evidence in his 3rd novel Let the Devil Sleep. The book’s central puzzle isn’t interesting [...]

While I used to read everything written by John Grisham earlier, the author hasn’t been on my must-read-authors list for a while now and the novels I did read(like The Confession) did nothing to change that impression with their flimsy storylines, biased writing, downbeat outlook and rushed endings. While the pacing and suspense that made [...]

David Baldacci moves away from his favorite setting, Washington D.C, for his latest stand-alone(for now!) novel Zero Day. It starts off with the murder of an entire family in Drake, a coal mining town in West Virginia. John Puller, a military investigator, is sent alone to investigate the killings. With Samantha Cole, the town’s cop, [...]

Thrillers usually develop pace at the expense of character development but Ted Dekker shows with The Priest’s Graveyard that strong characters can propel a story forward strongly too. A character-driven tale that develops tension and suspense out of the relationship between the two main characters, the book is a good read.
Renee is a prostitute and [...]

While time travel is one of my favorite genres when it comes to movies, I don’t think I’ve read any books in the time travel genre (unless ofcourse I count Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which had Harry, Ron and Hermione go back in time in one of the best segments of the [...]

John Verdon’s debut novel Think of a Number was an inventive and suspenseful mystery that impressed me with its fascinating puzzles and clever answers. Verdon gives us more of the same in his sophomore effort Shut Your Eyes Tight. While the plot is more complicated and the subject matter is more unsettling, Verdon once again [...]

David Baldacci returns to his favorite city Washington DC for his latest novel featuring the Camel Club. With good suspense and a good plot at the end of it, Hell’s Corner is a better read than Baldacci’s last few books in the Camel Club series.
Unlike Baldacci’s previous books, Hell’s Corner moves along like a mystery [...]

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy took the world by storm last year. I actually saw the movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo first after hearing the buzz about it. Intrigued by the characters and curious about the direction in which they would be taken, I ended up reading the next two [...]

Of late, Jeffery Deaver seems to be turning into Arthur Hailey, considering his efforts to set his novels in a new arena and delve into the subject in considerable detail each time. In The Burning Wire, he tackles electricity as Lincoln Rhyme pursues a criminal who employs it to cause havoc. The nature of the [...]