clair081

My review of Mick Herron's Real Tigers is up at Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/an-operational-advantage

Esmahan Aykol's Istanbul novels featuring Kati Hirschel, crime fiction bookseller and amateur detective, are a bit unconventional. Kati occasionally speaks directly to the reader, and her narrative is full of details about Istanbul and its citizens, of all classes (that detail is one of the most striking things about the series), but the crimes and even the investigation can be a bit difficult for the reader to pin down. I the newest, Divorce Turkish Style, there's a dead woman who was perhaps (and perhaps not) murdered; there's a Thracian separatist group and rapacious industrialists at odds over the pollution of a Turkish region; and there are several very complicated families (not least the unofficial "family" of Kati, including her roommate, the Spanish Fofo and her cop friend Batuhan). Kati insinuates herself into the dead woman's family as well as into the lives of other people associated, sometimes tangentially, with the victim (who was an environmental...