Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of The United Nations Conspiracy by Sharath “Da Saint” Shivani
I opened The United Nations Conspiracy late at night with the casual confidence of someone who believes they control their reading habits. One chapter, maybe two, I told myself. Somewhere between the first disappearance and the first coded warning, I glanced at the clock. Ten minutes had passed. It felt like an hour. My cup of warm water went cold beside me, unnoticed, as New York City stopped being a setting and turned into a living countdown. This book doesn’t unfold gently. It tightens.
Sharath “Da Saint” Shivani places us alongside Bhaarath Ibhan, a young Indian Foreign Service officer posted to the United Nations, expecting a life of protocol, paperwork, and carefully rehearsed neutrality. That expectation fractures almost immediately when a biochemist from Xinjiang vanishes in Manhattan, leaving behind coded notes, Masonic symbols, and a warning that hums beneath every page. What follows is not just a conspiracy, but a compressed twenty-four-hour descent where every hour carries weight and every minute feels accounted for.
What stayed with me most was not the scale of the plot, but its intimacy. The prose is sharp and forward-moving, yet deeply attentive to atmosphere. Corridors feel narrow. Elevators seem to pause too long. Institutions breathe in ways they shouldn’t. Shivani’s narrative doesn’t merely describe urgency — it performs it. With 162 short chapters tracking events almost minute to minute, the pacing becomes part of the story’s psychology. Reading it felt less like consuming chapters and more like watching doors close behind me, one by one.
Bhaarath’s journey is anchored by an uneasy alliance with Zhou Zhìyuǎn, a brilliant Chinese translator whose understanding of the UN’s hidden networks runs far deeper than her official role suggests. Their dynamic is quietly compelling. Trust is provisional. Information arrives with edges. Conversations feel overheard even when spoken in private. Rather than leaning on overt emotional exposition, the book allows tension to accumulate through what is unsaid, creating a character-driven pressure that mirrors the external threat.
There is a particular rhythm to the narrative that I found both exhilarating and, at times, exhausting — and I mean that as an honest reflection rather than a flaw. The relentless attention to time, detail, and movement leaves very little room to breathe. Midway through, I noticed a faint mental fatigue creeping in, the same kind you feel after navigating a crowded airport under stress. But that resistance felt deliberate. The characters don’t get relief, so neither do we. The structure enforces empathy through endurance.
The thematic core of the novel feels unnervingly current. Bioterrorism, shadow diplomacy, secret societies, and the fragile triangulation between India, China, and the United States are not presented as abstract ideas, but as living systems capable of failure. The looming biological weapon — described as more insidious than COVID-19 — lands with emotional impact not through sensationalism, but through plausibility. The book quietly asks how prepared we really are, and how much faith we place in institutions designed by fallible people.
Emotionally, my reading experience oscillated between fascination and unease. There were moments I paused not to rest, but to recalibrate, as if the narrative pressure needed a moment to dissipate. The literary strength here lies in sustained control. Shivani resists decorative prose in favour of narrative momentum, allowing the story’s architecture to do the heavy lifting. The impact is cumulative. By the final stretch, I felt keyed up, alert, and oddly protective of the fragile timeline the book constructs.
Readers who enjoy thrillers grounded in realism, tradecraft, and symbolic undercurrents will find familiar pleasure here. Comparisons to Tom Clancy, Daniel Silva, and Dan Brown make sense, but The United Nations Conspiracy carries its own identity, rooted in contemporary geopolitics and the claustrophobic interior of global institutions. It’s a book that rewards attention and asks for stamina.
I finished the novel with the distinct sensation of having spent a day locked inside a future that feels uncomfortably close. The narrative didn’t simply end; it released me. If you’re the kind of reader who enjoys feeling slightly unsettled, who doesn’t mind carrying a book’s tension with you even after you close it, this is one worth stepping into. Just don’t expect to glance at the clock the same way while you’re inside it.
#TheUnitedNationsConspiracy #BookReview #GeopoliticalThriller #EspionageFiction #LiteraryThriller #NarrativeImpact #ReadingExperience #IndianAuthors #PoliticalFiction #BookReflections #sameergudhate #thebookreviewman
4 views
Comments
Join the conversation
Sign up to comment, like, and connect with writers on thinkdeli.
Never miss a post from Sameer Gudhate
Get notified when Sameer Gudhate publishes a new post.
Related Posts
Untitled
The night I began Operation SINDOOR, the house was quiet in that fragile way silence gets after the news has exhausted itself. The phone lay face down. Outside, a distant train horn stitched the darkness together. I didn’t open the book expecting drama. I opened it expecting clar...
Untitled
What happens when evil no longer needs to announce itself, and belief stops being about surrender and starts becoming a transaction?
Untitled
Some books announce themselves loudly. This one arrived like a coded message slipped across a café table — quiet, dangerous, and impossible to ignore once you realised what it carried. I read The Silk Route Spy not in its original English, but in its Marathi translation, and that...
Untitled
I began Kalpvriksha: The God’s Code on a quiet evening when the house had finally exhaled — lights dim, phone face down, the kind of silence that feels earned. I expected a thoughtful mythological read. I didn’t expect the book to look back at me the way it did, calmly, almost kn...
Untitled
There are books you read with a pen in hand, underlining arguments, marking dates. And then there are books you read with your shoulders slightly tense, jaw tight, phone face-down beside you, because the world it speaks of is not safely contained between covers. Toward Armageddon...
Untitled
Some love stories don’t explode. They simmer. And Musafir Café feels exactly like that — two cups of chai growing cold between conversations that were never fully finished.
Untitled
You know that feeling when history suddenly stops being a chapter in your textbook and becomes something real — alive, pulsating, almost terrifying in its truth? That’s exactly what happened to me while reading Ninety Days. I was born in the late ’70s, and the assassination of Ra...
Untitled
Some books arrive like an invitation you didn’t know you were waiting for. You open the first page expecting light chatter, a pleasant distraction, maybe a few smiles between sips of coffee — and then, somewhere between one chapter and the next, you realise you’ve been quietly pu...
Untitled
Some books announce themselves with a thesis. This one arrived like humidity on skin — quiet, unavoidable, already inside the room before I knew it. I was reading, but I was also standing on a riverbank at night, ash cooling, water moving, the world refusing to pause for grief. T...
