Product Description

This slick, cynical adventure concerns one Minty Mehta who is involved in filming the Indian Army in Kashmir. Minty foolishly quadruple-crosses the Azerbaijanis, the Sikhs, the Indian Secret Service and the Indian Army.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #139696 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Customer Reviews

Bunker 13 - Section 8
Indian writers. See, I know the type. They write about their protagonist moving to England/America/Canada/Italy/Spain and from there, they fill pages and pages with the discovery of the culture clash concept. I mean, NEWFLASH, DIFFERENT COUNTRIES HAVE DIFFERENT WAYS OF LIFE! Damn, call the cops, hold the press. Not interested. BUNKER 13. I've been wating all life for a book by an Indian author that's not about the boredom of the high rise flat dwellers of Bombay. Imagine Catch 22, make it snort a line of M*A*S*H, freebase some Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, drop in a truckload of drugs, booze, women, corrupt army officials with egos the size of Bournemouth, the Kashmir conflict, high tech weapons, injecting H while in freefall and then seeing who chickens out by releasing their parachute first and a sex survey. Done that? Well, you've just about got it. It's breathless, urgent, relevant, topical, important and laugh out loud funny and the pace moves like a steam train. It's utterly mental. Nothing else this year will come close. Order it man, what the hell you waiting for?

Outstanding black comic thriller
MM is, amongst many other things, a failed Indian Army officer, a thrillseeker, an investigative journalist, a major league drug smuggler, a member of India's high-tech elite... and... well, lots more.

He is the protagonist of an extraordinarily dark comic thriller set against the background of the conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan. But this is just the starting point - the novel starts to describe the rivalry (military and criminal) between two elite Indian regiments - both sides of the rivalry being things MM is fascinated by.

What at first seems like petty graft by a few officers soon escalates into a vast and ornate criminal and political conspiracy, described in incandescent prose - this has more sex, gadgets, weaponry, double-crosses and hairsbreadth escapes than any ten run-of-the-mill crime/spy stories, and is told at breakneck speed with dazzling wit. In MM and Major Rodriguez we have two truly immortal (and immoral!) characters, the complex relationship between them at the heart of the complex goings-on.

There are some absolute bravura pieces of writing in here - the whole sequence about parachuting on drugs is mindblowing...

In the same way that a good curry consists of many spices well-blended, Bunker 13 mixes Ian Fleming, Hunter S Thompson, Joseph Heller, Iain Banks, and a good few mystery ingredients you won't have tasted to achieve a particularly splendid piquancy.

Absolutely excellent - high-octane read-in-one-sitting stuff. It positively cries out to be filmed.

Ever been mugged by a book?
Reporter Aniruddha Bahal delivers a rush of sex, drugs and violence wrapped around the extra-legal activities of his hyperactive anti-hero. The action is sparked by the double-dealing arms and drugs trade fuelled by the Kashmir border war, and you have no pause to deal with one slice of insider information before the next scenario has grabbed you by the throat. And more - it's written with a keen intelligence, a sly humour and a vibrant style that pummels you into submission.

The review quoted on the cover likens this to "Catch 22 rewritten by Hunter S Thompson". Neither suffers by the comparison - this is both a stand-out thriller and a staggering fictional debut.