A Dead Djinn in Cairo

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Three cheers for the inventive setting. The story opens by telling us that Fatma el-Sha'arawi is a special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities and is looking at a dead djinn. Immediately, we are tossed into a different world, one where djinns and ghuls and angels co-exist with “boilerplate eunuchs”, who seem to be robots, airships that dock in this Cairo of a British-free Egypt in what seems to be the early 20th century, and Marx-reading Sufists revolutionaries. It is a wildly inventive setting.

Fatma is a liberated woman who wears a version of a British suit, a bowler hat, and carries a cane. She is apparently trained in magical arts, that became a reality about forty years before when al-Jahiz drilled down to the world of the supernatural.

Fatma is tasked with solving the murder of the eponymous Djinn. Her investigation proceeds like a cannonball, as she busts through one scene to another, picking up clues to solve a conspiracy of Lovecraftian proportions.

The writing is good, the plotting seemed to verge onto the fortuitous and contrived, there is a cliched hint of a lesbian relationship in the offing and girl-power ascendant with Hathor-worshiping priestesses and female assassins, which is fine so long as it doesn't turn preachy, but the setting is imaginative catnip.

This is Tor.com book, which means that it is supposed to showcase characters or setting from a novel that Tor wants to push. I don't see the novel, but hopefully, there will be one in the future.