As I think I have said in my reviews of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s previous books, I don’t read a lot of mysteries. When I do get hooked on a mystery series, I don’t tend to review each one, but I’m making an exception (as you can see!) for Among the Ruins, the third in Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Esa Khattak / Rachel Getty series.
I was initially drawn into Khan’s work because of my general desire to support POC authors working in genre fiction. But I’ve stayed with the series because each book has done such a beautiful job of incorporating world events into the mystery: The murder victim in The Unquiet Dead appears to have ties with the Srebrenica Massacre of 1995; in The Language of Secrets, Khattak must investigate the death of a police informant at a potential terrorist cell. And in Among the Ruins, Khattak delves into the probably-political death of an Iranian woman whose documentary on the Green Revolution rendered her vulnerable to imprisonment and torture by the regime. In every case, Khan does a beautiful job of putting the history in service of the mystery without shortchanging the complexities of the horrors her characters are investigating.
It’s also lovely to watch Esa and Rachel’s worlds expand in this book. Though the cast perpetually changes jobs, ability to help with the mystery, and personal connections with Rachel and Esa, Khan never forgets which pieces are on the board. In Among the Ruins, she adds a fun new Plucky Girl Reporter sort of character about whom I hope to hear much more later — the Plucky Reporters in the Amelia Peabody series ended up being two of my favorite people, and not to spoil anything but at least one of them banged a Master Criminal one time.
On a more personal level, Khan captures my exact feelings about Iran in this book, the way I have felt about Iran ever since the Green Revolution happened and I started reading up on Iranian things. Though neither she nor Esa is Iranian, they share a deep admiration for the country’s history and culture, and an equally deep fury at the Iranian ayatollahs’ oppression of one of the most vibrant cultures the world has ever known. At one point, Rachel visits the following mosque:
That is not a CGI image from some new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-type movie. It is a non-pretend real actual mosque called Nasir al-Mulk Mosque. I encourage you to google it: I actually picked one of the most muted pictures I could find, because if you google this place your instinct is that it cannot be real.1 Here’s what Rachel thinks about it:
There was something to be learned from the cosmic radiance of her surroundings. Her mind was seized by a painful imagining: What must it be like to know your civilization possessed of such celestial beauty, and to find yourself the object of diminishment?
Among the Ruins gave me feelings, y’all. One of these days this oppressive regime of the ayatollahs will be done, and when that happens I am going to go there and see these damn mosques.
- It is real. It is also not the most astonishing mosque in the city of Shiraz, where it’s located. ↩