The body of a teenage girl is discovered in a cistern deep below the city of Istanbul. For the Turkish police force’s most talented officer, Inspector Çetin Ikmen, this is a difficult case. The girl was his daughter’s friend and her attire, that of a nineteenth-century Ottoman, offers no easy explanation.With his promise of justice to the dead girl’s mother still fresh on his lips, Ikmen is suddenly taken off the case and reassigned to the kidnapping of an ageing movie star’s wife. The star is hiding something and so, Ikmen fears, are his superiors. A powerful secret exists in the labyrinthine city; one which those on either side of the law will do anything to prevent surfacing…
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Reviews
Praise for Barbara Nadel's previous novels: An unusual and very well written first novel...Although the murder mystery is intriguing, it is the characters who make this book so successful
Ikmen will go far...will have you looking over your shoulder
Exciting, accomplished and original
My crime reader is raving about this author
A thriller that presents a Middle Eastern city populated by human beings, rather than specimens of oriental exotica, and a British writer who can get inside a foreign skin
Mixing Ikmen's police work with parapsychology, blood and intuition makes for a read that is as riveting as it is undeniably disturbing
Idiosyncratic and evocative
Full of complex characters and louche atmosphere