Jenny White, The Winter Thief (W. W. Norton, 2010)
The Winter Thief is the third novel in this murder mystery series set in late nineteenth century Istanbul. I read and reviewed the two earlier books in the series, The Sultan’s Seal and The Abyssinian Proof . Although I found The Abyssinian Proof somewhat disappointing, I liked The Sultan’s Seal quite a lot, so I was only too happy to revisit the series, hoping for a return to that novel’s excellence. I am pleased to report that my hopes were fully realized in The Winter Thief!
The lead character in the series is a Turkish magistrate (a high ranking officer of the court with investigative and other authorities) named Kamil Pasha. He’s in his thirties, well educated, from an aristocratic family. He is unmarried and lives in a large house staffed by a small number of servants, including the resourceful Yakup. Other recurring characters from the earlier novels include Kamil Pasha’s sister Feride, her husband Huseyin, and their twin daughters; Huseyin’s distant cousin Elif, an artist from Macedonia whose husband and child were casualties of the ethnic conflict that brought her to Istanbul; and Kamil Pasha’s friend Omar, chief of police in the Istanbul district of Fatih, along with his wife and adopted son Avi.
Although The Winter Thief abounds with mysteries that challenge Kamil Pasha, other characters, and the reader, not all of these tie directly to murders or to deaths of any sort. I will tell you a few just to pique your interest. All of these events take place on Little Christmas (January 6).
A young Russian Armenian socialist woman and her husband are visiting Istanbul. The woman asks an Armenian publisher to produce a print run of The Communist Manifesto in Armenian. She knows her husband is on a mission related to his involvement with the Armenian socialist movement, but she has no idea what that mission is.
Kamil Pasha calls upon an old friend of his late father’s to find out what he knows about a shipment of contraband rifles sitting on a British vessel in the harbor. The friend, Yorg Pasha, is, among other roles, an arms dealer.
An explosion at the Ottoman Imperial Bank in Karakoy serves as a distraction to cover a major robbery and ignites a fire at a neighboring restaurant, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries. Among the dead are a young woman named Rhea. When he discovers Rhea’s badly burned body, Vahid, the head of a secret police unit reporting directly to the Sultan and his vizier, becomes enraged and plots revenge.
Feride’s husband Huseyin leaves the family home for a meeting at an undisclosed location and fails to return that night or in the days that follow.
Eventually, all these pieces start to connect to each other. In the process of finding the connections, Kamil Pasha is arrested, charged with a murder he did not commit, and held at the notorious Bekiraga Prison for several days. Under orders from the Sultan, he and Omar, along with a unit of the Sultan’s own guard, undertake a hazardous journey to a remote location inland from the Black Sea port of Trabzon and near the border with Russia. They engage in a fierce and deadly battle with a force of Kurdish irregulars bent on obliterating the very people Kamil Pasha and his party have come to investigate.
The mishaps that befall both Kamil Pasha and other characters in The Winter Thief create a series of cliff-hangers that created and sustained my excitement as I read the novel. In some respects, this seemed more like an action adventure than a murder mystery, and I found that to be a welcome development in White's narrative approach. Also noteworthy is her stylistic preference for relatively short chapters and frequent shifts in scene and character viewpoint from one chapter to the next.
I found this to be a thoroughly enjoyable read and look forward to future offerings in this series with renewed enthusiasm.
Jenny White is an anthropologist who specializes in Turkish culture. She has a full-time teaching appointment at Boston University. Since fiction writing is not typically recognized and rewarded in academe outside of English departments, I give her a lot of credit for starting and then staying with this series. I also give Norton a lot of credit for publishing it, since this genre is not typical of their offerings at all.
