Kamil Pasha

Review of The Abyssinian Proof in Natural History Magazine (click here):

You can almost see the smoke and hear the calls to prayer as author Jenny White guides you through the narrow streets of Istanbul. The year is 1887, and Kamil Pasha, a magistrate under the Ottomans, is trying to keep the city from going up in flames. Muslim refugees from wars in the Balkans are flooding the neighborhoods, straining relief agencies and stirring already tense relations between Christians, Muslims, Jews, and a variety of smaller sects. To make matters worse, treasured relics have been disappearing from churches, mosques, and synagogues, and each group is blaming the others, and the sultan’s government, for the robberies. The Middle East, you might conclude, hasn’t changed much.

The measure of a mystery set in the past lies in its command of details and of character. White, a Boston University anthropologist who has written widely about Turkish culture and politics, gets those just right. Her hero, Kamil, in his second outing (the first was in The Sultan’s Seal), embodies all the contradictions of the Eurasian metropolis in which he lives. He is a thoughtful, literate man in a violent line of work, a Cambridge graduate who carries his grandfather’s worry beads along with a revolver through the mean streets of the city. Equally memorable is Malik, the patriarch of an exotic Abyssinian sect, who enlists Kamil’s help in investigating the theft of a silver box believed to contain proof of the existence of God. With a supporting cast of jaded police officers, ruthless crime lords, resourceful street urchins—and especially the green-eyed beauty, Saba—this book will leave you convinced you have traveled to an exotic time and place, if only for a few breathless hours.

Tags: Fiction, Istanbul //