The Last Man Standing by Naveen Singh
My take on the book:
Professor Mehta gave his two trusted students Aditya and Shalini the task to find the reason behind the mysterious behavior of people of Vilasnagar; a local grocery shop owner Karthik from Vilasnagar approached the professor with details of weird behavior of the locals; people started exhibiting super intelligence, in contrast to their normal behavior. As Aditya and Shalini reach Vilasnagar to find the ground reality, an unexpected death exposes the grim reality of an ambitious experiment gone wrong.
Will Aditya and Shalini be able to stop the inevitable catastrophe when human intelligence grows beyond safe boundaries, forms the rest of the story.
What sets The Last Man Standing apart from the stories in this genre is how firmly it is rooted in an Indian sensibility. The world he builds, the relationships that drive the plot, and the moral dilemmas at its heart, and the small-town mystery of Vilasnagar are the USP. This is a thriller that dares to ask whether humanity’s greatest threat might not be an enemy from the outside but the unchecked ambition within us.
Aditya makes for a compelling lead who is driven, flawed, and increasingly unsure of his own ground and the dynamic between him and Shalini gives the story an emotional anchor amid the escalating suspense. The pace rarely lets the tension drop, and the plot twists land with genuine force rather than feeling manufactured. The book’s greatest strength is that it never lets the big ideas of the ethics of science and the cost of human evolution swamp the story.
However, there are places where I felt the vocabulary was over utilized during normal conversations and emotional moments, when it should have been reserved to heighten the thrilling sections. Also, a significant portion of the suspense is revealed just one-third of the way into the story, a disclosure that might have landed better had it been retained for later.
A racy thriller that feels less like a debut and more like an authoritative command by an author firmly claiming his place in the Indian thriller space.
My rating:
3/5.