The unquiet dead

Review by Booklist Review

Investigating a seemingly accidental death leads to horrific revelations in this debut novel grounded in fact. What's known is that wealthy businessman Christopher Drayton died in a fall from a bluff near his home. What is soon revealed is that Drayton was notorious war criminal Lieutenant Colonel Drazen Krstic, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Bosnian Muslims from 1992 to 1995. The job of confirming Drayton's identity and looking into his death falls to Esa Khattak, head of Canada's new Community Policing Section, and his partner, Sergeant Rachel Getty, both guarding secrets themselves. Khattak, a practicing Muslim, is estranged from his closest friend, Nathan Clare, a neighbor of Drayton's, to whom he goes for assistance on the case, while Rachel, daughter of a former police supervisor, still lives with her dysfunctional family while searching for her long-lost younger brother. Khan's earnest but sometimes mannered prose occasionally impedes the flow of her narrative; still, this novel with interspersed chapters detailing accounts of survivors of the Bosnia massacres tells a story as heartbreaking as it is horrible and one that needs to be told.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Khan's beautiful and powerful first novel, Esa Khattak, a second-generation Canadian Muslim and the head of Toronto's Community Policing Section, and his sergeant, Rachel Getty, investigate the death of Christopher Drayton, who fell from a cliff overlooking Lake Ontario "with no evidence of outside interference." When their inquiries reveal that Drayton was, in fact, the alias for a Serb who oversaw the slaughter of thousands of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, Khattak and Getty have to wonder whether foul play was involved. Through her characters' interactions and passages taken from testimony at war crimes trials, Khan reveals the depths of horror and venality that people are capable of while also portraying the healing of long-sundered relationships. Who killed Drayton remains a mystery until the final pages, but Khan's story, as well as her author and source notes, leave no doubt of the monstrous crimes committed against Muslims in Bosnia while U.N. forces turned away. Agent: Danielle Burby, Hannigan Salky Getzler. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Inspector Esa Khattak investigates whether a man's deadly fall from the Toronto bluffs was accident, suicide, or murder. His seemingly straightforward inquest unearths atrocities perpetrated during Yugoslavia's collapse in the early 1990s and unmasks a war criminal complicit in Bosnian Muslim genocide. Although this is Khan's debut novel, Khattak and his partner, Det. Rachel Getty, emerge full blown, their backgrounds and professional relationship seamlessly woven into the narrative. This device endows an inaugural episode with the comfort and gratification of a prodigious series. Actor Peter Ganim's resonant delivery morphs as needed into female or youthful characters without distracting the listener. Framed by actual events, the case exposes Khattak and Getty to barbarities vividly depicted by Khan, a former editor in chief at Muslim Girl magazine, who holds a PhD in international human rights law. VERDICT Fans of police procedurals and cerebral detecting will be thrilled to meet Khattak and Getty. ["Readers of international mysteries will be most drawn to the story, but anyone looking for an intensely memorable mystery should put this one at the top of their list," read the starred review of the Minotaur hc, LJ 12/14.]--Judith -Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Two Toronto detectives are handed a politically sensitive case.Esa Khattak is a second-generation Canadian Muslim who heads the new Community Policing Section, created to deal with delicate cases involving minorities. A call from Tom Paley, chief historian at the Canadian Department of Justice, drops Esa and his partner, Rachel Getty, into the case of Christopher Drayton, who fell, jumped or was pushed off a cliff. They visit Drayton's famous neighbor, writer Nathan Clare, who is Esa's lifelong friend. Clare longs to renew a relationship that was destroyed by Esa's former partner, a siren who bewitched Clare into testifying against Esa in a complaint that almost ended his career. Rachel has secrets of her own. She still lives at home with her abusive ex-cop father and her meek mother in the hope that the beloved brother who left home at 15 will seek her out. The older daughter of Drayton's fiancee, mercenary Melanie Blessant, hated Drayton and hoped she and her sister could live with their father if her mother remarried. After dozens of letters with horrifying stories of rape and murder are found in Drayton's safe, Esa admits to Rachel that Drayton is probably Drazen Krstic, a former lieutenant colonel in the Bosnian Serb Army and the instigator of horrific war crimes. Paley wants the story kept quiet until they positively identify Krstic and learn the manner of his death. The scandal of U.N. forces standing by while thousands of Muslim men, women and children were slaughtered is intensified by the possibility that Krstic entered Canada with a fortune in blood money. Khan's stunning debut is a poignant, elegantly written mystery laced with complex characters who force readers to join them in dealing with ugly truths. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1. I will never worship what you worship. Nor will you worship what I worship. To you, your religion-- to me, mine. Esa Khattak turned his head to the right, offering the universal salaam at the conclusion of the evening prayer. He was seated with hislegs folded beneath him on a prayer rug woven by his ancestors from Peshawar. The worn red and gold strands were comforting; his fingers sought them out when he pressed his forehead to the floor. A moment later, his eyes traced them as his cupped palms offered the final supplication. The Maghrib prayer was for Khattak a time of consolation where along with prayers for Muhammad, he asked for mercy upon his wife and forgiveness for the accident that had caused her death. A nightly ritual of grief relieved by the possibility of hope, it stretched across that most resonant band of time: twilight. The dying sun muted his thoughts, much as it subdued the colors of the ja-namaz beneath him. It was the discipline of the ritual that brought him comfort, the reason he rarely missed it. Unless he was on duty--as he was tonight, when the phone call from Tom Paley disturbed his concentration. He no longer possessed the hot-blooded certainties of youth that a prayer missed or delayed would bring about a concomitant judgment of sin. Time had taught him to view his faith through the prism of compassion: when ritual was sacrificed in pursuit of the very values it was meant to inspire, there could be no judgment, no sin. He took the phone call from Tom Paley midway through the prayer and finished up in its aftermath. Tom, the most respected historian at Canada's Department of Justice, would not have disturbed him on an evening when Khattak could just as easily have been off-roster unless the situation was urgent. CPS, the Community Policing Section that Khattak headed, was still fragile, barely a year into its existence. The ambit was deliberately vague because CPS was a fig leaf for the most problematic community relations issue of all--Islam. A steady shift to the right in Canadian politics, coupled with the spectacular bungling of the Maher Arar terrorism case in 2002, had birthed a generation of activist lawyers who pushed back vigorously against what they called tainted multiculturalism. Maher Arar's saga of extraordinary rendition and torture had mobilized them, making front-page news for months and costing the federal government millions in compensation when Arar had been cleared of all links to terrorism. A hastily concocted Community Policing Section had been the federal government's response, and who better than Esa Khattak to head it? A second-generation Canadian Muslim, his career had seen him transition seamlessly from Toronto's homicide squad to national counterintelligence work at INSET, one of the Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams. CPS called on both skill sets. Khattak was a rising star with an inbuilt understanding of the city of Toronto's shifting demographic landscape. At CPS, he was asked to lend his expertise to sensitive police investigations throughout the country at the request of se nior investigating offi cers from any branch of government. The job had been offered to Khattak as a promotion, his acceptance of it touted as a public relations victory. Khattak had taken it because of the freedom it represented: the chance to appoint his own team, and as with INSET, the opportunity to work with partners at all levels of government to bring nuance and consideration to increasingly complex cases. And for other reasons he had never offered up for public scrutiny. His mandate was couched in generic terms: sensitivity training for police services, community support, and an alternative viewpoint in cases involving minorities, particularly Muslim minorities. Both he and his superiors understood the unspoken rationale behind the choice of a decorated INSET officer to head up CPS. If Khattak performed well, then greater glory to the city, province, and nation. If he ran into barriers from within the community as he pursued his coreligionists, no one could accuse the CPS of bias. Everyone's hands were clean. It didn't matter to Khattak that this was how he had been lured into the job by his former superintendent, Robert Palmer. He loved police work. It suited an analytical nature tempered by a long-simmering hunger for justice. And if he was being used, as indisputably he was, he was also prepared to enact his own vision for CPS. What flame-fanning bigots across the border would doubtlessly call community pandering, a fig-leaf jihad. Take anything a Muslim touched, add the word jihad to it, and immediately you produced something ugly and divisive. But Tom wasn't one of these. Chief historian at the Department of Justice, he was a gifted academic whose fatherly demeanor masked a passion for the truth as sharp and relentless as Khattak's own. He had called to ask Khattak to investigate the death of a Scarborough man named Christopher Drayton. There was no reason that CPS should have an interest in the man's death. He had fallen from a section of the Scarborough Bluffs known as the Cathedral. His death had been swift and certain with no evidence of outside interference. Khattak had pointed this out to his friend in measured tones, and Tom had let him. When he'd finished, Tom gave him the real reason for his call and the reason it encroached upon Khattak's jurisdiction. Khattak heard the worry and fear beneath Tom Paley's words. And into the remnants of Khattak's prayer intruded a series of recollections from his youth. Of news reports, hurriedly organized meetings and volunteer drives, followed too slowly by action. He saw himself as a young man joining others in a circle around the flame at Parliament Hill. He absorbed the thick, despairing heat of that summer into his skin. His dark hair flattened against his head; he felt in that moment his own impotence. He listened to Tom's labored explanation, not liking the hitch in his friend's breath. When Tom came to the nature of his request, Khattak agreed. But his words were slow, weighted by the years that had passed since that summer. Still, he would do as asked. "Don't go alone," Tom said. "You'll need to look objective." Khattak took no offense at the phrasing. He knew the unspoken truth as well as Tom did. Because you can't be. "I'll take Rachel." He had told Tom about his partner, Rachel Getty, before. "You know her well enough to trust her?" "She's the best officer I've ever worked with." "She's young." "Not so young that she doesn't understand our work. And I find her perspective helps me." He meant it. But even as he said it he knew that he would work with Rachel as he had done in the past. Withholding a part of the truth, of himself, until he could see the world through the clear, discerning eyes that watched him with such trust. He knew he could turn to his childhood friend, Nathan Clare, for background on Drayton. Nate lived on the Bluff s and would understand why he'd agreed to Tom's request. Nate would understand as well the toll compliance would take. But Khattak's bond with Nate had long since been severed. It was a mistake to think Nate still knew him at all. He'd meant the last words of his prayer to be a blessing asked for his family, in a space he tried to keep for himself, exchanging solitude for solace. Lately, he'd come to accept that there was no separate peace. His work, and the harshness of the choices he had made, bled into everything. He rose from his prayer rug to find that dusk had given way to dark. He thought of the tiny documents library in Ottawa with its overflowing shelves. He'd spent most of that long-ago summer there, collecting evidence. And he remembered other words, other blessings to be sought with a premonition of ruin. They are going to burn us all. Excerpted from The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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