Um, but anyway, this is the fourth book in her Esa Khattak / Rachel Getty series about a Canadian police inspector and his right-hand woman, who are always investigating crimes to do with human rights violations. A Dangerous Crossing sees Esa and Rachel headed to Greece in search of Esa’s friend Nathan’s sister, who has been working for a humanitarian organization trying to help Syrian refugees find homes in Canada. A young refugee and a French Interpol agent were recently found dead on the island of Lesvos; Audrey’s gun is the murder weapon, but Audrey herself has disappeared.

Though I read books more to experience stories than to learn something, the books in this series invariably teach me a lot — both in and of themselves, and by opening up new avenues of interest. For example, Esa and Rachel travel to an island where many boatfuls of Syrian refugees have washed up and settled in camps as they try to find permanent homes. So far, so familiar: I knew camps like this existed. Khan brings them to vivid life, the many perils refugees have faced and the many they will continue to face in the camps and the journeys onward. She explores with compassion the refugees’ fear and helplessness, as well as the frustration of the native Greeks at being the front line of a refugee crisis on an unprecedented scale.

But Khan explores more than those basics. I learned that an organization called the Commission for International Justice and Accountability has been collating evidence of war crimes by the Assad regime for years. They depend on leakers — one former Syrian military officer with the pseudonym Caesar smuggled out thousands of photographs cataloging torture of prisoners — as well as staff members actively pursuing relevant documents pertaining to Syrian war crimes.

I know that I’ve said very little about the actual plot of A Dangerous Crossing. But truly, what I love about Ausma Zehanat Khan is that she weaves plot points seamlessly into her worldbuilding — can I say worldbuilding, when it’s real life? We learn about the leaks, or the work of the NGOs, or the epidemic of child trafficking, because the characters do, as they try to find out who killed these two people and what happened to Audrey. It’s a twisty, fascinating mystery in a setting that reminds the reader of the tragedies taking place on on our countries’ doorsteps.

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Arian is a warrior, linguist, and Companion of Hira, an order of women who draw their power from the Claim, a type of magic that draws its power from sacred scripture. They are battling against the Talisman, a movement led by the One-Eyed Preacher that seeks to eradicate scholarship and knowledge and the written word and to subjugate all the lands under an absolutist patriarchal rule. But Arian has a chance to find the Bloodprint, a physical copy of her faith’s scripture — if she can undertake the dangerous quest to retrieve it.

I’ve been a fan of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s for a while now. She gets me to read mysteries, and I never read mysteries! But her mysteries are grounded in history and grapple deeply with questions of culpability, complicity, and oppression, so they’re catnip to me. The Bloodprint deals with many of the same issues: Arian’s enemy, the Talisman, use a distorted version of her own faith to enslave women, brutally conquer every city in their path, and suppress literacy wherever they go. This is genuinely really hard to read in places, because the Talisman are destroying monuments and texts that Arian’s order values deeply, but that cannot be replaced.

The Bloodprint is very much a road trip story, which is always fun for me. Arian travels with her apprentice, Sinnia; her friend and would-be lover, the Silver Mage Daniyar; and a freed slave named Wafa. They cover a lot of territory, and I was glad that Khan had provided vocabulary and character guides in the back of the book. However, things did tend to get a trifle complicated, in that way secondary world fantasies often do, where the writer has a lot of elements and is trying to introduce all of them in the series’s first book. I got muddled in spots, and it wasn’t always clear which names and concepts I needed to remember for later vs which ones were just there to provide local color on Arian’s journey.

I gave up on secondary world fantasy years ago, when I started to notice how heavily inflected by imperialistic worldviews it all seemed to be. The Bloodprint, which draws on Islamic art, culture, and history, is a refreshing reminder that there’s nothing inevitable about Eurocentric fantasy stories. I’m thrilled to see Ausma Zehanat Khan branching out from mystery into fantasy, and I’ll look forward to reading more in this series.

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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.

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I don’t read a lot of mysteries, so I feel unqualified to speak to the success of the book as a mystery. As a piece of fiction, though, I found it immensely satisfying. Esa gets brought onto the case almost as political cover: They need a Muslim officer who can appear to be investigating the case without investigating it so much that the sting on the terrorist cell gets derailed. The lead detective handling the terror case believes that Esa was promoted unfairly for “diversity” purposes, and he is condescending and rude to Esa at every turn while undermining the legitimacy of the murder investigation that Esa and Rachel are working on. That his distrust of Esa turns out to have real, terrifying consequences for the case is predictable but also the kind of thing I don’t see played out that often in — particularly — mystery books.

At first I was surprised that Khan chose to go with a “Muslim terrorist cell” plot for her second book. The previous book dealt with the genocide in Bosnia, with Esa’s religious background giving a context and particularity to his investigations. This story felt, at first, altogether more like one that I’d encounter on a television show. But one of Khan’s strengths as a writer is that she uses the structure of a familiar story while fleshing out a range of experiences and faiths for her Muslim characters. Members of the cell have different motives and levels of involvement, while people like Esa and his sister, or Mohsin’s widow, or Mohsin’s father, practice a peaceful version of Islam that is, of course, far more common and normal than the violent extremism we see in the cell leader, Hassan.

An element of the book that I found very unsatisfying was the character of Esa’s sister Rukshana. There will be spoilers in this paragraph only. We find out early on — through Ciprian Coale — that Rukshana is engaged to the apparent leader of this extremist terror cell. When Esa goes to speak with her about it, Rukshana is hotly defensive of her relationship, which has arisen within the last year, and she refuses to listen to Esa’s words of caution. Okay, fine, people in love never listen to anyone who naysays them. The book never tells us what Ruksh sees in Hassan, or where she met him, or what the course of their relationship has been; and at the end of the book, after Hassan nearly kills Ruksh, we see her anger with Esa for not telling her that Hassan was part of a terror cell. But we don’t see any moment where she’s like “oh my God the person I said I loved was a violent terrorist.” It felt weird and off — she felt like a plot device, not a character in her own right.

Recommended!

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The Diverse Books Tag is a bit like a scavenger hunt. I will task you to find a book that fits a specific criteria and you will have to show us a book you have read or want to read.

If you can’t think of a book that fits the specific category, then I encourage you to go look for one. A quick Google search will provide you with many books that will fit the bill. (Also, Goodreads lists are your friends.) Find one you are genuinely interested in reading and move on to the next category.

Everyone can do this tag, even people who don’t own or haven’t read any books that fit the descriptions below. So there’s no excuse! The purpose of the tag is to promote the kinds of books that may not get a lot of attention in the book blogging community.

Find a book starring a lesbian character.

I choose my favorite of Helen Oyeyemi’s books, White is for Witching. It’s about a pair of twins who live in a haunted and xenophobic house. The girl twin, Miranda, goes off to Cambridge and gets involved with a black girl. The house is not happy about it.

Find a book with a Muslim protagonist.

Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Unquiet Dead features a Canadian Muslim detective trying to solve a mystery relating to a possible Bosnian war criminal. This was obviously right up my alley, as I read very widely about genocides in history and their aftermaths. I enjoyed the mystery a lot and was excited to find that it’s the first in a series about this detective, Esa Khattak, and his right-hand woman, Rachel Getty.

Find a book set in Latin America.

A Latin America-set book on my TBR list that I can’t wait to read when it comes out next month is Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun, which is about three Jamaican women who fight against the installation of a new hotel in their community. It got a ton of buzz at BEA, and my pal Shaina raved about it, so I’m in!

Find a book about a person with a disability.

Do mental disorders count? If yes I am choosing Nathan Filer’s wonderful The Shock of the Fall, which made me cry many times like a tiny, tiny child. The depiction of what it’s like to live with schizophrenia is so beautifully done, without ever being patronizing or overly sentimental. I am tearing up now thinking of one moment in particular. Sniffle, sniffle.

Find a science fiction or fantasy book with a POC protagonist.

Don’t mind if I doooooo. A recent read that I enjoyed a lot, but didn’t get around to reviewing, was Nnedi Okorafor’s book Lagoon, in which a race of aliens makes their first contact in Lagos, Nigeria. All of the various protagonists trying to make sense of this bewildering new state of affairs are black Nigerians, and it’s a weird and spooky and excellent piece of scifi.

Find a book set in (or about) any country in Africa.

Jenny cracks her knuckles and does some jumping jacks in preparation, then remembers she should be reasonable about this and not get all crazy with it. Suffice it to say, I love reading books set in or about countries in Africa, and it is hard for me to pick just one.

I’m going to choose a book from a smaller press, Imran Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System. This book (which I’m still waiting for my library to order for me!) is a novel about the changes in South African society over the last forty years. I have been given to understand that it deals with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which I am extra interested in.

Find a book written by an Aboriginal or American Indian author.

Your recs for this category would be appreciated, as I didn’t have a ton of choices lined up. I’m choosing Ambelin Kwaymullina’s very enjoyable The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, a YA dystopian novel with (I’m delighted to report) a sequel to be published in America this year.

Find a book set in South Asia (Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc.)

I really like Ru Freeman’s book On Sal Mal Lane, which I read a few years back. Set on a road in Sri Lanka at the outset of the Sri Lankan Civil War, it depicts a group of families (some Tamil, some Sinhalese, and some Burgher) dealing with the changing political and racial dynamics of their country. It reminded me of one of my all-time favorite authors, Rumer Godden, and was just altogether great.

Find a book with a biracial protagonist.

Everyone was crazy about Fran Ross’s Oreo last year, when the 1974 satirical novel was reprinted. It’s a comic novel about a mixed-race woman in Philadelphia and New York, and although it has been described as picaresque and that is not really my jam,¹, I am excited for Oreo to become the exception to my picaresque hate.

Find a book starring a transgender character or about transgender issues.

For this one, I’m choosing Meredith Russo’s If I Was Your Girl. Protagonist Amanda has just started at a new school and is falling in love with a boy named Grant; she badly wants to come out to him as trans, but fears how he will take it. I hear amazing things about this book and this author and can’t wait to try it!

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