BENGALURU: After her guardian is kidnapped and held at ransom, a young archeology professor’s rescue efforts trap her in a bizarre murder plot involving a Bollywood superstar. Now, forced to evade an intensive manhunt across the country, she must decipher mysterious clues and unravel a larger conspiracy involving the world’s largest religion to save herself and free her guardian.
This is the plot of The Conspiracy, the latest novel by city-based author Dev Prasad that is sure to remind readers of the popular Robert Langdon series by British author Dan Brown. Co-authored by first-time author and IT professional Kiron Abraham, The Conspiracy is inspired by Brown’s works, along with similar works from several Indian authors, including Ashwin Sanghi and Amish.
“I have always been fascinated by the works of Dan Brown, the writing style, the beautiful descriptions and the interesting historical tidbits that formed the core of his novels,” shares Abraham. “India is a vast country and has a rich history, but there are few historical fiction books. Not until recently did the genre take off, and even then, Christianity from the Indian perspective hasn’t been explored much.
So we thought it would be an interesting idea.” Having explored the Hindu religion and Indian history with his previous novel The Curse of Surya, Prasad wanted to work on a different subject for his second foray in the genre. The Conspiracy explores European and Vatican history, just as much as it does Indian history. While Prasad is an accomplished author with multiple publications across various genres to his name, The Conspiracy is Abraham’s debut book.
“My relationship with books and stories date back to my school days. I used to write at leisure and always wanted to publish a book, but I was not clear about the steps that we needed to take,” Abraham shares. “Dev and I work together, we have regular meetings and one day I showed him two or three pages of something I had written, and he recognised the potential of the idea.
So, he suggested that we should collaborate on the idea.” Prasad credits their shared background in software development, especially in quality assurance, for aiding them while working on the book, despite Abraham’s lack of relevant experience. “We approached the writing process in a similar manner to how we approach new software development.
Rather than both of us working on different sections of the book individually, we used to hold long discussions about the ideas we thought would work beforehand. Only when both of us agreed about the approach, did one of us put the idea onto paper,” Prasad shares, adding that having a person who could view each other’s work from a critical standpoint helped them recognise logical inconsistencies we l l before handing the manuscript to the publisher.
Furthermore, Prasad feels that the novel is unique in having a strong female protagonist, especially since the genre, both in India and the West tends to feature male protagonists. “Growing up, I read the works of Sidney Sheldon and the one thing that impacted me most was how he always had a strong female lead. When I started writing fiction, I wanted to follow in his footsteps and have a strong female lead as well. I thought it was high time that a female protagonist was shown in similar light as Robert Langdon or James Bond,” he says.
Following the release of their newest thriller novel, The Conspiracy, authors Dev Prasad and Kiron Abraham speak to CE about the idea behind the book’s plot and its inspiration from the popular works of British author Dan Brown