Deadly Web (Inspector Ikmen #7) – Barbara Nadel
A naked teenage girl is found dead near the beautiful Byzantine Yoros Castle in Turkey. She has stabbed herself through the heart but there is evidence of bizarre sexual practice. In another part of Istanbul, a young boy seems to have committed suicide in similar circumstances. What dark rituals could have compelled them to fatal self-abuse? Inspectors Cetin Ikmen and Mehmet Suleyman follow an internet trail that leads them to an underworld of Goth nightclubs and Satanic worship. But even those murky shadows hide more than they reveal and the answers to an ever increasing number of suspicious deaths is more shocking and terrible than they could ever have imagined.
“Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,” Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada.
We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family s new life.
Zagreb, summer of 1991. Ten-year-old Ana Jurić is a carefree tomboy who runs the streets of Croatia’s capital with her best friend, Luka, takes care of her baby sister, Rahela, and idolizes her father. But as civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, soccer games and school lessons are supplanted by sniper fire and air raid drills. When tragedy suddenly strikes, Ana is lost to a world of guerilla warfare and child soldiers; a daring escape plan to America becomes her only chance for survival.
The body of a teenage girl is discovered in a cistern deep below the city of Istanbul. For the Turkish police force’s most talented officer, Inspector Çetin Ikmen, this is a difficult case. The girl was his daughter’s friend and her attire, that of a nineteenth-century Ottoman, offers no easy explanation.With his promise of justice to the dead girl’s mother still fresh on his lips, Ikmen is suddenly taken off the case and reassigned to the kidnapping of an ageing movie star’s wife. The star is hiding something and so, Ikmen fears, are his superiors. A powerful secret exists in the labyrinthine city; one which those on either side of the law will do anything to prevent surfacing…
