Margaret H. (ExPeruanista) -
The author has been coyly implying on his website that this is the final Inspector Yashim novel, which made me quite sad, as I thought the earlier four were excellent, and in fact started me reading a lot about Turkey. Now that I've read this one, I think it may be just as well if there are to be no more. Several of the characters are not made distinctive ("Wait, is he the tall one or the short one?"), the plot is unnecessarily convoluted, especially at the end, and you get no satisfactory resolution of a couple of major points. There's a sort of the-lady-or-the-tiger ending that I've always thought was just an author being lazy and, in a way, cheating the readers. If we wanted stories that build up suspense and then don't come to a clear solution, we have Real Life, no?
