One Death to Die: A Kayankaya Mystery [Hardcover]

Proving that the classic Hammet/Chandler private eye plot can be enriched in even the most exotic setting, Arjouni continues his pungent series about the Turkish-German detective Kemal Kayankaya. Like his creator, Kayankaya is the son of Turkish guest workers, and he gets very little respect from his adopted country. A client, an "average schmuck from Frankfurt's West End" named Weidenbusch, wants Kayankaya to find his missing Thai ladyfriend, who seems to have been kidnapped by gangsters preying on illegal aliens. But Jakob Arjouni, who has learned from the masters how to turn a story inside out until we almost forgot where we started, has plenty of twisty surprises in store. Arjouni's last Kayankaya mystery, And Still Drink More!, is also a good read.

The opening of Europe's borders has stirred blatant racism throughout the continent, but it has also presented mystery novelists with a rich source of story ideas. In his third Kemal Kayankaya novel, Arjouni explores the immigration issue as it affects the travails of his Turkish private-eye hero. Despite being a German citizen, Kayankaya feels the sting of otherness wherever he goes in his hometown of Frankfurt, which gives him a moral imperative to solve the case of a missing Thai woman, the victim of a scam in which illegal aliens are lured into buying false papers and then promptly deported. Arjouni develops his human-rights theme with considerable poignance while offering an eye-opening view of the underside of contemporary German society. All this series needs to elevate it to the status of, say, Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers , set in Sweden but mining the same thematic vein, is less reliance on the conventions of the American hard-boiled novel, especially as it affects the character development of his hero. Bill Ott

You'd think it would be easier to find a missing person if you knew where she was, but that hasn't helped Frankfurt businessman Manuel Weidenbusch, whose imported Thai girlfriend Sri Dao Rakdee was kidnapped from under his nose by the crooks who'd promised to forge her a new set of identity papers. And it doesn't help Kemal Kayankaya, the Turkish detective whose caseload seems to revolve around xenophobia (Happy Birthday, Turk!, 1993, etc.). But Sri Dao's winding trail does guarantee Kayankaya a zippy, deliciously dirty tour of legal fleshpots and low-down scams victimizing illegal aliens before he pins the odd homicide to the obvious suspect. Plotted with verve and written with passion, though without the originality of Kayankaya's raffish debut. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

While investigating the disappearance of Sri Dao, a Thai girl smuggled into Frankfurt for the flourishing sex trade, Kemal Kayankaya, the gritty P.I. with an attitude, uncovers an underworld of illegal aliens, corrupt cops, hustlers, and pimps. IP.