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Over the years I've come to dread the police procedural novel set somewhere exotic. So often the 'local colour' is used to cover the fact that the plot is rather thin, the characters merely foreign rather than three-dimensional. As a result , Barbara Nadel was at something of a disadvantage when I opened ''Pretty Dead Things'', but it didn't last for long.
Ahmet Aksu reported his wife missing after he had not seen her for two weeks. Theirs is an 'open' marriage with both being free to take other lovers. It seems that Emine Aksu has taken full advantage of this - on at least one occasion she took her lover to live in the family home, but Ahmet was apparently easy about this. He and Emine met in the nineteen sixties when Istanbul was the beginning of the hippy trail to Kathmandu. They were both part of the group who met in the Pudding Shop in Sultanahmet although it seems that they never took to the road but stayed in their home city and married in 1974.
Reading the book made me want to have another look at [[Magic Bus]] which takes a modern look at the hippy trail and how the conflict in Afghanistan and uncertainties in Pakistan mean that the journey is no longer possible. For another excellent police procedural, albeit without the exotic location you might enjoy [[Savage Moon]] by Chris Simms.
This book featured in our [[January 2008 Newsletter]].
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