The Hawala Agent

De: Smarak Swain

Narrado por: Kiran Kumar

Digyen Burmah is a forensic auditor and corporate spy. An old friend needs his help in finding his wife and coworker, who mysteriously vanished during an official tour. Apparently, the company is also frantically trying to find his elusive wife.

Burmah investigates the company and unearths shady deals in tax havens, transactions with hawala agents, cash payments to influence Indian elections and many more shocking details.

Did his friend’s wife know too much? Or was she a conduit in the hawala channel used to transport money across borders? Whose money is it? What agenda is the company pursuing in the garb of developing software?

Based on true stories from income tax raids, The Hawala Agent brings to fore how hawala is used to launder money and finance extremism.

©2022 Smarak Swain (P)2022 Audible, Inc.

Entertaining

Really enjoyed the narrator. A different flavor detective story. The way everyone interacted was interesting.

omg the narrator

the narrator doesn't change his tone AT ALL for any of the characters, making conversations difficult to follow

Loved the story, not the narrator

The story was good and interesting but the narrator was awful. His tone did not change for the different characters speaking, so it was hard to follow conversations. And he was very flat so even when something was emotional or charged it felt forced. Too bad, this could have been very engaging, as it was, it was a slog to the end.

India storyline nails modern morality with sly wit and razor sharp writing.

Narrator with native accent perfectly captures sly wit and razor sharp writing style. A modern India slant on noir sleuthing. Protagonist certified in fraud assessment must negotiate personal morality in the midst of corporate corruption, extremist financial scheming and the sorrow of human trafficking.

Loved insight into Indian drama

Very good story as read by an Indian gave it an air of authenticity for me which I enjoyed.

A bit different

Interesting story. Well paced. An accounting thriller! Overall I enjoyed it. While I liked the narrator with an Indian accent, sometimes it was a bit thick for me to understand. What also made it tough was keeping track of foreign names. But, seeing as it was free, I’d recommend this book for a change of pace.

Storytelling

All of it was great…hard to follow names due to languages and dialects throughout

Fascinating, if difficult to follow

This was an interesting, smart, and riveting detective novel, thick with intrigue.

I enjoyed the book very much, and would read another book by this author, but in the interest of full disclosure, the average American reader needs to be warned that this story is very foreign, and hard to follow closely.

The reader has an Indian accent thick as mango chutney from the back of the refrigerator. His pronunciation of English words, to an American ear, is in many places, a challenge to decode. One humorous example that stuck with me, is the word extravaganza, which he pronounces as two distinct words: extra vaganza.

Similarly the names the characters are mostly meaningless to an American ear, and except for one or two which are repeated over and over, it makes it very difficult to follow which characters are which, and which character is being discussed at any given moment. There are many other references in the story, such as denominations of money (crows) and many other things in the context of India, that are meaningless, to an American listener.

Having said that, I recommend this book to those who are willing to make allowances. It’s worth the extra effort.

This book would be four stars, if they gave it a reading in more comprehensible American English.

Well done, eye-opening true crime story

Very well written and performed, it kept me listening to find out what happened next. The conclusion taught me about issues I didn’t know about before.

Very enjoyable

I liked the story. I am fascinated with the culture in that part of the world and now it makes sense to me.