A mobile ad hoc network (MANETs) consists of a group of mobile nodes which are connected by wireless links. The peculiar characteristics of MANET like open medium, high dynamic nature of the network lead to various attacks which partition or destroy entire network. A black hole attack can be working in opposition to routing in mobile adhoc networks. A black hole node is a malicious node which sends the fake reply for route requests and drops the packets. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to detect blackhole nodes in the MANET. Our solutions find out the safe route between sending node and receiving node. The simulations show that the proposed approach is efficient than normal AODV when the black hole attack is present with high packet delivery and less packet drop. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.