Despite their many differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Esa Khattak, implicitly. But she’s still uneasy at Khattak’s tight-lipped secrecy when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton’s death. Drayton’s apparently accidental fall from a cliff doesn’t seem to warrant a police investigation, particularly not from Rachel and Khattak’s team, which handles minority-sensitive cases. … cases. But when she learns that Drayton may have been living under an assumed name, Rachel begins to understand why Khattak is tip-toeing around this case. It soon comes to light that Drayton may have been a war criminal with ties to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.
If that’s true, any number of people might have had reason to help Drayton to his death, and a murder investigation could have far-reaching ripples throughout the community. But as Rachel and Khattak dig deeper into the life and death of Christopher Drayton, every question seems to lead only to more questions, with no easy answers. Had the specters of Srebrenica returned to haunt Drayton at the end, or had he been keeping secrets of an entirely different nature? Or, after all, did a man just fall to his death from the Bluffs?
In her spellbinding debut, Ausma Zehanat Khan has written a complex and provocative story of loss, redemption, and the cost of justice that will linger with readers long after turning the final page.
more
annihilation, Bosnia, Canada, justice, law-enforcement, missing-persons, mystery, read, real-horror, retribution, thriller*****
If you reading Stephen King is your idea of horror, the realities enclosed in this Canadian mystery will challenge that. At least King’s stuff is 100% fiction. The horrors of Bosnia are not.
The publisher’s blurb is quite …
The Unquiet Dead is a wonderful book, thought provoking. You will be thinking about it long after you finished reading it. The characters are strong.
I look forward to the next in this series
Book One in a series you might have missed, The Unquiet Dead has so much going on, so many layers reaching across space and time and religion, from the Bosnian War to a suicide investigation in contemporary Canada. The settings feel real and the characters genuine, but one of Khan’s greatest gifts to the reader is a never-dragging narrative that …
I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t follow the news closely when I was in university. The stories coming out of the former Yugoslavia didn’t seem square with the rest of the good news in the West about the fall of communism, and it was easy to think it couldn’t possibly be that bad. Could it?
It could, and was, and Khan’s first novel is a searing …
One of the best books I’ve ever read. Loved it!
Excellent book. Great and instructive plot. Good characterizations. I’ll be looking for other books by this author.
This was a difficult book to get in to. The Canadian setting made it seem a bit off. I ended up doing lots of research about the actual events and found it so terribly depressing. It was a heavy read for me.