- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: No Exit Press (Aug 23 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1842432354
- ISBN-13: 978-1842432358
- Product Dimensions: 18.4 x 12 x 2.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 281 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,209,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"As Kayankaya hurtles from one nest of vipers to the next . . . the unsavory atmosphere is inimitable." —Kirkus Reviews
"Jakob Arjouni writes the best urban thrillers since Raymond Chandler." —Tempo
"A worthy grandson of Marlowe and Spade." —Stern
"There is hardly another German-speaking writer who is as sure of his milieu as Arjouni is. He draws incredibly vivid pictures of people and their fates in just a few words. He is a master of the sketch—and the caricature—who operates with the most economic of means." —Die Welt
"Arjouni tells real-life stories, and they virtually never have a happy ending. He tells them so well, with such flexible dialogue and cleverly maintained tension, that it is impossible to put his books down." —El País
Product Description
It all began with a favor. Kayankaya and Slibulsky were only trying to protect their friend Romario from his protectors, men who were demanding hard cash for the service. It ended with two bodies on the floor of Romario's restaurant, their faces covered in ghostly white makeup. Kayankaya is determined to track down their identities, when he realizes that he himself is being pursued by a faceless and utterly ruthless criminal gang. A new element has broken into the established order of Frankfurt gangland: battle-hardened Croatian nationalists. And when Kayankaya rescues Bosnian teenager Leila from a refugee hostel, the stakes get even higher. This thrilling, utterly captivating novel is the perfect fix for fans of literary noir.
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Customer Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.3 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hard Boiled Racism in Frankfurt, Nov 6 2010
By Steven Forth - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Kismet: A Kayankaya Thriller (4) (Paperback)
Kismet is part of a series featuring a German detective of Turkish extraction Kemal Kayankaya. The books are set in Frankfurt, but not the glittery efficient Frankfurt most visitors know from trade shows and business meetings. This story turns around the station area, the red light district where gangs struggle for control of the drugs, prostitution, gaming and protection rackets. The book surfaces the engrained racism of Germany towards its Turkish population (all of the industrial economies have deep racist thinking em bedded in their psyche, including Canada where I live, so this is not a particular slap on Germany, it is a fact that festers if ignored). Kismet, in which a group of Croatian nationalists is trying to wrest the area from its current Albanian, Turkish and German bosses. Kayankaya gets caught up in this almost by accident, killing two of the Albanians while trying to help a Brazilian friend. Struggling with a guilty conscious, and wanting to keep the Brazilian alive, he sets out to find out what is really behind the killings and who the people he killed are. In the best of Noir style, he becomes obsessed with the case, and won't let go no matter how often he is threatened or beaten up. The book gives a real feeling for the gritty side of Frankfurt and the ethnic tensions that color people's relationships. Kayankaya is the right mix of tough, smart, determined and vulnerable. He can suck up punishment and will kill if he has to but is not a bloodless automaton. All in all a fascinating look into Germany and an intriguing character. I will follow this series and look for the next books as they come out.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable for fans of the genre looking for something a little different., Mar 29 2011
By Sarvi Sheybany "Film Student" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Kismet: A Kayankaya Thriller (4) (Paperback)
If you new to the genre and looking for something great to sell it to you as literature, this isn't the title that will do it (check out Jim Thompson, Bill James, or others). If you read a lot in this genre and are looking for something new to add some variety, the characters and settings of this book are a nice change of pace. Good, entertaining summer reading, and a nice view into something a little different from the usual LA/Gotham hardboiled setting, or historical settings, but not something that made me want to run out and buy everything this author's ever written.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hard-Boiled Europe, Mar 5 2011
By K. Nishikawa - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Kismet: A Kayankaya Thriller (4) (Paperback)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
Arjouni's final novel in the Kayankaya series is a treat for crime fiction lovers: a breezy, first-person narrative situated firmly in the hard-boiled tradition. Comparisons to Chandler and McBain are rife, but the novelist Arjouni reminds me of the most is that pillar of the African American crime tradition, Chester Himes. Like Himes, Arjouni is his country's keenest observer of the intersections of race, masculinity, and the urban underworld. And like much of Himes's fiction, Kismet includes memorable scenes of surreal, explosive violence.
Originally published in German ten years ago, in 2001, some of Kismet's narrative details (I won't mention which, for fear of spoiling the "mystery") are dated, a product of specifically turn-of-the-millennium transformations to European society. Still, the novel affords great insight into Kayankaya's experiences as a Turkish-German man who, by all accounts, is as solidly working-class "Frankfurt" (the city in which he resides) as can be. For fans of the hard-boiled tradition, you can't go wrong with this finale to Kayankaya's adventures. The American publication of Kismet by Melville House leaves much to look forward to for the rest of the series' availability Stateside.
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