Effendi | Jon Courtenay Grimwood | Science Fiction | Science Fiction | eBooks
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CHAPTER 1 18th October Nine days before the Grand Jury met in an upstairs office at Champollion Precinct, Ashraf Bey sat through a warm Iskandryian evening, bombed out of his skull, at a pavement table outside Le Trianon, drinking cappuccino and listening to DJ Avatar wreak havoc on the words of a Greek philosopher. The afternoon call to prayer had finished echoing from the mosque on Boulevard Saad Zaghloul and the bells from l'Eglise Copte had yet to begin. If it hadn't been for a sense of dread hanging over El Iskandryia, this could have been a Monday in October like any other. Horse-drawn caliches, their brasses shined and wheel bosses polished, rumbled up the Corniche, from the fat seawall known as the Silsileh all the way north to Fort Qaitbey, where the ancient Pharos lighthouse once stood. And at both ends of the sweeping Corniche, at Silsileh in the shadow of Iskandryia's famous library, and at Fort Qaitbey, groups of tourists watched as fishermen set hooks or mended and untangled nets, waiting for the evening tide. It was a tourist who'd taken the taxi that stopped outside Le Trianon, with its window down and sound system up too loud, giving Raf the chance to hear the city's favourite DJ one more time. "And remember . . ." Avatar's voice was street raw. "Rust never sleeps. Coming at you from the wrong side of those tracks, this for the Daddy, the Don . . ." Most of Raf's officers thought DJ Avatar came up with SpitNoWhere on his own; if they thought at all, which Raf considered unlikely. So they happily stamped the corridors at Police HQ, humming along, not knowing that the unchopped original went, "In a rich man's house, there's nowhere to spit but his face." Raf hadn't known that, at least not until recently, but the fox in his head did. And while the fox couldn't say why, the General's aide de camp had just delivered to Raf an... |
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Masterfully blending speculative fiction and hard-boiled mystery, Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s acclaimed Arabesk series plunges readers into a world eerily familiar and shockingly unpredictable. Here a troubled detective follows a trail of clues through a city where innocence itself may be a thing of the past.… It’s the twenty-first century and El Iskandryia—an alluring metropolis built on seduction, corruption, and lies—is the double-dealing heart of an Ottoman Empire that still rules the world. But these days a sense of dread hangs over El Isk—and over Ashraf Bey, the city’s new Chief of Detectives. A trial is set to take place, and it’s up to Raf to decide the case. There’s only one problem: the suspect is the billionaire father of the woman Raf should have married. Industrialist Hamzah Effendi is accused of crimes so horrible that even El Iskandryia wants him eliminated. But Raf finds that protecting the sensual and impetuous Zara Quitrimala from the secrets of her father’s past may be even more dangerous. For Raf must now solve a series of brutal murders that are somehow connected to the case—and to Zara. And the closer Raf gets to the truth, the more elusive the answers become—and the closer he comes to his own demise.… “Raymond Chandler for the 21st century.” —Esquire “All brilliant light and scorching heat...Grimwood has successfully mingled fantasy with reality to make an unusual, believable, and absorbing mystery."—Sunday Telegraph (London) “If you’re not reading Jon Courtenay Grimwood, then you don’t know how subtle and daring fiction can be.” —Michael Marshall Smith, author of Spares and One of Us “Fast, furious, fun and elegant, the Arabesk trilogy is one of the best things to hit the bookstores in a while.” —SFRevu |
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