Book: Cold Truth
Author: Nikhil Pradhan
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 220
Price: Rs 250
Interviews, WhatsApp messages, emails and newspaper clippings – these are the new age deductive tools used by Nikhil Pradhan in his first-ever foray into thriller with Cold Truth. The book follows Gloria Lama (whose name is revealed towards the end) as she researches cases of missing children in Delhi for a book she wants to write. The book opens with the report of a missing girl. But soon it becomes apparent that she is not the only one kidnapped. Curious about these developments, and wanting to help the missing children, Lama sets out on a quest for answers.
The kidnapping mystery soon takes the form of a much larger conspiracy that spins out from Delhi to Moscow and finally ends in the bleak landscape of Antarctica. A resourceful journalist, with five novels under her belt, Lama seeks answers through her sources – a police officer who gives her inside information; a hacktivist going by the alias of NineInchFails; a researcher known by the pseudonym Daedalaus; and a retired intelligence officer, Abhay Chaudhary.
The path to the truth is littered with the deaths of everyone involved with the abduction of the children, who then appeared to have been made the subjects of biological experiments, before being disposed of. Despite the perilous nature of the task, rescuing the little girl from the newspaper report becomes a prerogative for both Lama, and Chaudhary, who agrees to go to Moscow to find answers, digging through old labs, abandoned testing facilities and more. Lama does her research from Delhi, sifting through old newspaper reports, following online leads, and putting together her notes in the form of a book.
While the rest of the book follows the format of a thriller, the end takes it into the territory of science fiction and the paranormal. The epilogue is open-ended, leaving the reader to figure out whether the menace has indeed been eradicated or not.
But the author seems to have gone amiss with his research – the missing children are said to have one thing in common, "a strain of diabetes known as Type 2 Mellitus, which means their kidneys are weak and low on insulin".
However, while the kidneys help in the degradation and circulation of insulin, the hormone is actually produced by the pancreas. So, to say that the children's kidneys are low in insulin is a mistake that sticks out, especially as the rest of the book is based on this premise.
If one is able to ignore this one point, then the fast-paced book makes for an easy read.
