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A Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak Novel
by Ausma Zehanat Khan
Book Reviewed by:A complex and provocative story of loss, redemption, and the cost of justice that will linger with readers long after turning the final page.
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. 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.
Where The Unquiet Dead really soars is Khan's sensitive and intelligent portrayal of the violent history of the former Yugoslavia, which raises questions of responsibility, retribution and justice. This is a novel that manages to be informative without being didactic or slow-paced, and to be complex without being confusing...continued
Full Review
(509 words)
(Reviewed by Kate Braithwaite).
On June 25 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, which, since World War II, had operated as a federal republic comprised of the territories – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia.
The departure of Croatia, a republic with a large Serbian population, was of particular concern to Slobodan Milosovic, Serbia's party leader and president, who also served as president of the Federal Republic of of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. Armed conflict followed, initially focused in Slovenia and Croatia. But as the desire for independence spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina, a republic with a diverse ethnic population including a large Muslim population and a Serbian (and pro-...
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