Cetin Ikmen, an Istanbul police inspector who cannot function without his perennial bottle of brandy, much to the dismay of devout Muslim wife and straight-laced officer Mehmet Suleyman, his assistant, makes his debut in Barbara Nadel's dark mystery Belshazzar's Daughter: A Novel of Istanbul (#232).
An elderly Jewish man has been brutally murdered in the Balat district, and a large swastika drawn on the wall of the room. Inspector Ikmen hasn't been having a particularly easy time getting his rest with eight children already at home and a ninth about to arrive any day. Who can sleep well on a couch? But his boss makes it clear to him that the Israeli Consulate is anxious that this seemingly anti-Semitic case be cleared up and an arrest made promptly. The most likely suspects are both ex-patriots; the blond Englishman Robert Cornelius, seen close to the apartment building where the murder took place at about the right time, or Reinhold Smits, a wealthy elderly German businessman who has been in Istanbul prior to WWII and is known to have been a Nazi supporter. During the course of Ikmen and Suleyman's investigation, both men have connections to a mysterious Russian family and its domineering matriarch. But why the murder now? What has the victim done to provoke the violent attack? Or will Ikmen have to unravel the secrets of the past to learn the truth?
I began to get glimmerings of where this story might be going about half way through the novel, but the threads didn't unravel the way I expected them to, and there were surprises right up through to the last page. Both my husband and I found this an absorbing read, where the city of Istanbul creates the setting for a modern day story that could only take place here.
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