The Unquiet Dead
Ratings8
Average rating3.8
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 The Unquiet Dead, 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.
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For the Read Harder Challenge, a mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+. The sections dealing with the past genocide of Muslims in Bosnia were gripping, and if the entire book had been as well written, I would have given it at least 4 stars. But the main characters in the detective story are oddly portrayed–the police hardly investigate at all and personalities aren't ever fleshed out. I also kept wondering if I missed an earlier book, although this is #1, because there were so many vague references to past experiences that didn't really move the current story along. I would give these sections a 2 or less, so split the difference with a 3.
I wanted to love this book with its complex, heart wrenching plot, but I struggled with the author's character depictions. Many times I felt that emotions were dramatic, even for the serious subject matter. Reading a real story around the Bosnian genocide was unusual and horrifying at the same time.
I did like the author's rich detailing of time and place, and how diverse her characters are in backgrounds.
This story was an interesting mix of small-scale and large-scale crime: a man is found dead after falling from the Scarborough bluffs, possibly due to foul play. As investigators Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty investigate him, though, they start to suspect he may be connected to the war crimes of the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War of the early 1990s. Through both of these events Ausma Zehanat Khan explores ideas surrounding justice, loyalty, and the lasting effects of crime on a community. The war crimes Khan writes about are shocking, and for some are hard to read about, but Khan contrasts the events with characters that are deeply humane (if flawed), which makes it easier to read about.
The Unquiet Dead is a very slow-burning novel - in the early sections it feels very slow and cold. If you stick with it, though, it is and incredibly rewarding and haunting piece of literature.
