Paperback: 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. While The Unquiet Dead is a crime novel, its contents focus around the history of the Bosnian war and genocide with the Srebenica Genocide forming the background for the crime investigation.
The Unquiet Dead (2015) is the first instalment in the refreshingly original Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak mystery series set in Toronto, Canada. Currently, there are five books in this mystery series.
The Unquiet Dead was awarded the Arthur Ellis Award and Barry Award for Best First Novel in 2016, and was nominated for a Macavity Award for Best First Book and an Edgar Award for First Mystery.
About the author: Ausma Zehanat Khan is a British-born (Leicester, UK) Canadian living in the United States, whose own parents are heirs to a complex story of migration to and from three different continents. A former adjunct professor at American and Canadian universities, she holds a PhD in International Human Rights Law, with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre as the main subject of her dissertation. She has practiced immigration law and taught human rights law at Northwestern University and York University. Previously the Editor in Chief of Muslim Girl Magazine - the first magazine targeted to young Muslim women - Ausma Zehanat Khan has moved frequently, traveled extensively, and written compulsively. In a 2018 interview with Nick Douglas, published in Life Hacker magazine, Khan described how she devoted more time to her writing as a novelist when she and her husband began moving more often, when it did not seem worthwhile to get the qualification to practice law in a short-term home. In 2020, Khan's nonfiction essay Origins and Destinations was published by Seal Press in the crime fiction writers' anthology, Private Investigations. Khan currently lives in Colorado with her husband. The Unquiet Dead was her first novel. Khan is also the author of of the Khorasan Archives epic fantasy series.
Rating: 5/5
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