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When Emine Aksu, the flamboyant wife of an Istanbul style guru, suddenly goes missing, Inspector Cetin Ikmen's investigation leads him deep into her strange and colourful past.
Emine was a hippie when she was younger, who wholeheartedly enjoyed the liberated lifestyle that swept across Istanbul in the sixties. Her husband suspects that she was visiting an old friend at the time of her disappearance. Meanwhile, Inspector Mehmet Suleyman is called to a terrifying scene at the art deco Kamondo Stairs in the old banking district of Karakoy. The skeleton of a woman has been discovered in one of the large plant containers. Could these two bizarre incidents be linked?
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Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel is now a public relations officer for Rethink Severe Mental Illness's Good Companions Project. Her previous job was a mental health advocate in a psychiatric hospital. She has also worked with sexually abused teenagers and taught psychology in both schools and colleges. Born in the East End of London, she now lives in Lancashire and has been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years.
first book i've read by the author and not the last.set in Istanbul to the backdrop of the Liverpool v AC Milan Champions League final Pretty Dead Things is an excellent crime novel which will keep you gripped.According to the other review this isn't a patch on her other work,in which case i can't wait to read the others as i polished this off in 2 days.
Barbara Nadel's Istanbul is a strange mixture: half nostalgic fantasy, harking back to the multi-ethnic metropolis of the Ottoman Empire, and half careful observed exposé of the city that lies beyond the place tourists see when they visit. It's a seductive combination: i ended up visiting Istanbul after reading her books.
In this novel she explores the world of a wealthy, westernised elite, who practise open marriage... sometimes with fatal results. The plot is one of her best and her characters, especially world-weary, incorruptible Inspector Ikmen and his noble but troubled sidekick Suleyman, have become fully fleshed individuals by this point in the series.
Nadel also, as is her custom, introduces us to yet another city landmark by dumping a body there. This time it's the Kamondo Steps, built by a family of Jewish bankers - a quirky meeting of sculpture and staircase.
I've said it before and i'll say it again: the Istanbul tourist board ought to be paying her.
I've always enjoyed Barbara Nadel's novels about the Istanbul detective Cetin Ikmen but this one was a sorry showing. Clunkily plotted and poorly written she has reduced her likeable characters to mere cardboard cut-outs whilst the other characters barely make it off the page. One of the things I had always enjoyed was her deep knowledge of the Turks, Turkey and particularly Istanbul, but now this knowledge is wheeled out in indigestible chunks I would be better off looking up in a good travel guide.
I really hope this was just a one-off dip in the Ikmen series, but if you are looking at this and haven't read any of the others, don't give this one a go - it will do nothing but put you off when there are other much better ones to read.
I came to this book without terribly high hopes of enjoying it. I had read Ashes to Ashes, which features Francis Hancock as the detective earlier in the year and found that book to be rather dull and pointless. As I had purchased 2 Barbara Nadel books at the same time I thought I would give this one, which features a different set of characters a try to see if I enjoyed it any more. Pretty Dead Things is part of a series of books set in Turkey, and features Inspector Cetin Ikmen as the main character. Having not enjoyed the first book by the author, and also not being terribly interested in Turkey I had fairly low expectations of this book. But I found that I did enjoy it a lot more than I expected to. The plot was quite original, although I have read many 100's of crime novels I have not across anything that closely resembles this story. The book was easy to read, although I did notice a few spelling and grammatical errors in my paperback copy. I don't think that I will read another book by the author as I didn't find it sufficiently compelling, although I do note that one other reviewer has mentioned that this is not one of her best books, so perhaps I didn't pick the best one in this series to start with.
