Spy in Amber – Manohar Malgonkar

Rating: 3.5/5
Read Between 26th June 2016 and 27th June 2016

Edition Details:
Format : Paperback
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Rupa

First Sentence:

The vastness of the Himalayas guards many secrets, Shangri-Las large and small, that are tucked away securely behind the impenetrable barriers of mountain and valley, great tracts of land still not surveyed by man, and therefore merely blank spaces on maps.

Ragyabas monastery,though it’s on Indian part of the Himalayan Range but it’s inaccessible to both India and china. It houses of the order of Amber lamas who are so called because of their cloaks which is translucent yellow in color. Apart from the monks this monastery is supposed to house priceless jewels of Panchen Lama. Now the lamas are fearing Chinese intrusion to get hold of these jewels  and so they want to transfer these jewels to the Indian government for safekeeping.
When Chinese learn  about this plan of the Head lama, they send their two ruthless spies,Chomo Jung and Pempem Kachin for thwarting the plan and retrieving the jewels.
And standing in between them is colonel Jeet who is trained for this type of stuff. He is an agent who is given the task of finding the Chinese plan and then making sure they don’t succeed in executing it. He has to find out what Chinese have planned and stop them from achieving it.
Will the Chinese succeed in their plan?What would Colonel Jeet do to make sure Chinese’s plan doesn’t come to it’s conclusion?
A deadly game has begun. Lives are at stake and no body can be trusted. How will this game end? You’ll have to read the book to find out about it, of courses.

I liked reading every bit of this 130 pages novella. It’s fast paced espionage thriller with Indian agents and Chinese spies.
The book as the author mentions earlier was first written as a screenplay of a movie. It was then transcribed  in to the book by author’s daughter Sunita. It has that feel of 70’s movie where these plots were common and one can imagine the role of protagonist that is Jeet, played by Jitendra or Dharmendra.
As far as book is concerned i liked the book. There are murders, agents,double agents,honey traps.car bombs, in short everything that would ensure you’d not get bored reading this espionage  thriller. As it is a thriller you know before hero who the culprit is and so there is lack of mystery there. But it makes it up for that for speed. There are times when hero is trying to figure out the identity and you want to goad him to do that.
The only problem with the book is that it it moves like a movie.  When we are reading a book we want to know more about the characters about which we are reading, but that it doesn’t cater to that. We don’t get any back story there which would be good for a movie but for a novel you need these things to make the reader relate to the character. But for me this was not such big deal.  

The things move fast enough to make it a gripping read. I loved reading it and would recommed it to you to. Manohar Malgonkar ji was writing in 70 along with R K Narayan ji. I know Narayan ji but  this was the first Manohar Malgonkar book that i read. I’ll surely be looking for more books by him.
If you have read the book, do tell how did you felt about it. If you haven’t then you can get the book from the following link:

Amazon