The Mahabharata Secret by Christopher C. Doyle

The Mahabharata Secret by “Christopher C. Doyle”, if you are a fan of Indian mythology or have good knowledge about it then, there are chances that this book might disappoint you. The Mahabharata Secret is the story of, as the title speaks itself, a secret bury in the pages of the great epic, if gets discovered by people with sinister intentions can bring huge destruction to the world.

A nice opening story of emperor Ashoka and his discovery about this secret mentioned in prologue gives the reader a necessary knowledge about the time and era in which this secret has been discovered and since then kept hidden by a group of people who later been refereed as members of the brotherhood. The members of brotherhood have sworn to protect this secret hidden from the people with dark intentions from discovering it to use it for the destruction. The secret has been passed on by members to their next generations and that's how the first character of this story, Vikram Singh a nuclear scientist comes to know about it. Even though Vikram got very little space in the story plot, the author has done justice to the character and portrait it with sufficient importance and necessary information.

As the story moves forward, more characters come into the picture like Vijay, Vikram's nephew and the lead character of the story, an assassin Terence Murphy, a character with evil intentions, Vijay's best friend Colin. Greg White, Professor of archaeology and history. These characters further in the story plays a very important role as the plot is developed around ancient Indian history and few of them team up with the main lead and helps to solve riddles involving ancient languages. The story moves further explaining about The legends of 9 and how they are connected to hidden secrets.

After the introduction of all these characters the real chase and action begins with a series of events like the abduction of Vijay and his friend Colin by a group of people, the connection between the cryptic emails sent by Vikram and The key, these people are looking for. The kind of destruction mentioned in the story is related to terrorist activities involving characters like Terence Murphy and Farooq Siddiqui which created nice suspense and kept me guessing about how could these events be related to this hidden secret and made me more curious about the secret. The story further moves into an interesting journey of how the legends of nine developed elaborate systems of riddles and clues for the purpose of securing the location of the secret and how the main lead and other characters gradually decipher each clue and find out about this great secret. The story talks about all the challenges they face while solving these puzzles. The author has given a lot of historical references like about the time of the emperor Ashoka and the clues and riddles are also have references from Bhagvat Gita and Mahabharata.

The novel is very fast-paced and fun to read. The author has built all the characters along with the plot properly, given each character required length and connected them with others to form this astonishing fantasy. The author has given a very nice fusion of ancient myth and modern technology through this novel which makes it recommendable for all ranges of a reader from children to older. The author has also given a romantic angle in the novel with the help of the lead character Vijay and Radha. It's very minimal but decently explained. The part which I mostly liked in the novel is the clues or riddles and its connection with mythology. The sequence of events is handled very cleverly and written in a very simple format which makes the story easy to understand. Overall the journey of these characters till they find out about the secret is very captivating and all the hype create around this secret made me read this novel in one go without putting it down.

But there are few things because of which I felt this novel might not attract specific kind of audience, like I said earlier if you have detailed knowledge of Indian Mythology or more inclined towards reading only mythological stuff then this book might be disappointed for you because even though the title says it's related to Mahabharata, it's more about Vimana Parva. Also, the secret around which the whole story is built, when you find out about it, it simply doesn't make justice to the novel. as interesting as the whole journey of finding out this secret is, the actual secret is not that appealing.

Despite all the negative points I have mentioned, I would still, like to recommend the book as the story is exceptionally well built and conveyed in proper sequence which does not cause any kind of confusion in what the author wants to tell. Also, the editing of the book is very well done. If to talk in terms of rating, I would like to give 3.5 out of 5 stars to this book.