Death (and food!) in Vienna and Istanbul

An Evil Eye

Jason Goodwin

Farrar, Straus, Giroux

Edgar-winner Goodwin’s Istanbul investigator, the sultan’s eunuch Yashim, navigates the backrooms and intrigues of the sultan’s harem as adroitly as he does the docks and alleyways of 1839 Istanbul in a case that threatens the peace of the Ottoman Empire.

The book opens in uproar in the aftermath of the old sultan’s death. As the old sultan’s harem slowly removes itself to the Palace of Tears, the traditional home of widowed harems, the new harem pushes its way in, jeering at the outgoing women.

Meanwhile, Yashim is called to investigate a body found in the local Christian monastery’s cistern. Yashim takes his good friend Stanislaw Palewski, ambassador from Poland, a country no longer recognized in Europe (which has swallowed it up), and finds the monastery threatened by angry locals who believe the monks are defiling a Muslim body.

But Palewski recognizes a brand marking the dead man as a member of a secret Russian military cadre, which is particularly alarming as the Russians are pressing the Empire more and more closely. And then Yashim’s nemesis and mentor the ruthless Fevzi Ahmet defects to another potential threat, the Egyptians, with the Ottoman fleet. Not much of a fleet, to be sure, but still.

Goodwin, a historian of the Ottoman Empire (Lords of the Horizons), fills us in on the complex and confusing pressures the Empire faces from Russia, Egypt and Europe — not enough to really understand it, but enough to steep the reader in the intrigue, corruption and political footwork that drive the plot.

Back in the harem, a place where the women’s skills include orchestral music and poetry, but the height of ambition is to achieve the sultan’s bed and bear a son, the squabbling turns deadly. The most powerful, the old sultan’s mother and sister, rule their separate domains with imperious guile honed over years of experience. Would they kill? Probably only if they really had to.

Goodwin’s Istanbul is a diverse and fascinating place, teeming with Greek fishermen, cooking fish and sharing ouzo on the waterfront, kebab peddlers and grilled mackerel sellers perfuming the bustling streets, elegant European shops along the thoroughfares and herbalists and charm sellers tucked away in warrens of tiny streets.

The plot is complex and builds to a satisfyingly tense and dangerous conclusion, but the real pull of these novels is character and atmosphere. And food. Yashim is a man defined by his time and place and circumstances, who has carved out a precarious niche, which gives him the independence he requires, while allowing him to maintain his loyalties to the sultan.

He’s also a fine cook, who usually has to dash off somewhere before sitting down to enjoy the fruits of his mouth-watering labors. Goodwin has produced a free e-book with Yashim’s recipes, but it’s apparently available only to Kindle or iTunes users.

Fans and newcomers alike will enjoy Yashim’s fourth outing and this lively sojourn in the exotic world of the Ottoman Turks.

Lynn Harnett, of Kittery, Maine, writes book reviews for Seacoast Sunday. She can be reached at lynnharnett@gmail.com.

via Death (and food!) in Vienna and Istanbul | SeacoastOnline.com.

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