Title: The Unquiet Dead Series: Getty & Khattak #1
Author: Ausma Zehanat Khan
Published: January 13, 2015
Genre(s): Mystery/Thriller
Page Count: 352
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Detective Esa Khattak is in the midst of his evening prayers when he receives a phone call asking that he and his partner, Detective Rachel Getty, look into the death of a local man who has fallen off a cliff. At first Christopher Drayton’s death—which looks like an accident—doesn’t seem to warrant a police investigation, especially not from Khattak and Rachel’s team, which handles minority-sensitive cases. But it soon comes to light that Drayton might have been living under an assumed name, and he may not have been the upstanding Canadian citizen he appeared to be. In fact, he may have been a Bosnian war criminal with ties to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. And if that’s true, any number of people could have had reason to help him to his death.
As Rachel and Khattak dig deeper into the life and death of Christopher Drayton, every question seems to lead only to more questions, and there are no easy answers. Did the specters of Srebrenica return to haunt Drayton at last, or had he been keeping secrets of an entirely different nature? Or, after all, did a man just fall to his death in a tragic accident?
For me, what this book comes down to is the fact that the author doesn’t really show a lot of talent for fiction writing. She has impressive credentials and clearly knows what’s what in terms of Bosnia and Srebrenica, and I like that she brought those things into her debut. However, The Unquiet Dead is poorly written, sloppily constructed, and very troubling in relation to female representation and the attitude adopted toward all female characters. I wanted to like this book, but appreciation for the ideas behind the text does not at all solve my problems with the glaring faults I found in The Unquiet Dead.
IT’S A MYSTERY WHAT THE MYSTERY EVEN WAS
The opening chapter is a passable hook. Inspector Esa Khattak gets a call from a friend about a dead body. Khattack works with crimes where race/ethnicity comes into play, and somehow this death (murder?) comes under his purview—for reasons the reader, and Khattack’s partner, Rachel, doesn’t know. So, yeah: mysterious death that’s giving the handsome and well-mannered Inspector Khattack an angst fit. Good lead.
Except Khan never explains what has Khattack so upset. For 20% of the book. Seriously? For one-fifth of the text, the reader doesn’t even know what’s going on. Neither does protagonist Rachel, for that matter, which is even more troublesome. What kind of person doesn’t inform his partner about a current investigation? What kind of person just goes along with her parter’s cryptic moods? Though in regards to that last one, there are way more pressing questions to be asked about Rachel and her character.
RACHEL: THE ULTIMATE WOMAN-ON-WOMAN HATER
My biggest issues with The Unquiet Dead stem from Rachel’s characterization and her interactions with the other female characters. I still think the book would be pretty awful if Rachel weren’t in the picture, of course, but Rachel got all my gears grinding and spurred a lot of Twitter-ranting.
In short: Rachel hates other women. Always, without exception. There is not a single other woman she meets over the course of the text that she doesn’t immediately hate on sight. Don’t believe me?
She was everything that a strong, square-built, hockey-playing female police officer most definitely was not. Pretty, petite, girlishly feminine without being cloying. Chic, expensively dressed even for a night at the pub, her russet scarf and body-hugging dress a perfect complement to her figure and coloring. Instead of the babyish tones her squeal of delight had seemed to indicate were at hand, her voice was low-pitched and sweet.
Rachel hated her on sight.
Like I said.
For the most part, it seems that Rachel hates other women because they’re prettier than her. Rachel doesn’t like pretty women, and she also doesn’t like “provocative” women—how dare women be upfront and honest about enjoying sex! She’s highly insecure and, honestly, not the most logical person ever. She lives with her abusive parents, even though she’s an adult, on the off-chance that her runaway younger brother will try to contact her. Because obviously he won’t ever find her unless she keeps the same address, right?
But I think what’s worse than Rachel herself was the way Khan supports her anti-woman views by the portrayal of other women in the text. Except for Rachel, every woman in The Unquiet Dead is extremely beautiful, predatory, “slutty”, and capital-E-Evil. There are no “positive” depictions of women in this entire book. (I certainly don’t consider Rachel, who sex-shames and body-shames and judges without hesitation, to be a positive depiction.) If these were well-rounded, dynamic “Evil Women” (à la Gillian Flynn or Alissa Nutting), I wouldn’t be upset. But these female characters are all shallow and two-dimensional, relying on stereotypes that are never expanded upon.
I suppose like Rachel, the reader is just supposed to hate all other women on sight?
FICTION, OR AN UNSOUGHT HISTORY LESSON?
Beyond Rachel’s varying issues and her tremendous internalized misogyny, The Unquiet Dead is didactic as hell.
I get that Bosnia is a major point of interest for the author, and I don’t have any problem with Khan bringing it into her fiction. But the info-dumping and “mini lessons” that permeated this book were clumsy and dull. There is a natural way to incorporate current events and/or history into fiction, but this novel does not showcase it at all.
At one point, Rachel goes to some other person and says something the equivalent of “What? Women who were in Bosnian rape camps were traumatized? I never would have guessed! Please explain how this happened!” and is then told, at length, what exactly went on in a Bosnian rape camp…which, what? (Granted, this is Rachel speaking, but still.) It was such an obvious entryway into the author’s “teaching mode” and I could not have been more displeased. Sure, more people should be informed about Bosnian rape camps, but the way in which the author went about it was all wrong, in terms of keeping up momentum within a work of fiction.
A lot of other reviewers have suggested that Khan would have been better off writing a nonfiction book about Bosnia, and I agree. It’s not that her expertise is off-base or unwanted, it’s that it’s inappropriately applied.
GOOD PREMISE, BAD EXECUTION
As I said, Ausma Zehanat Khan has a lot of great ideas and a real passion for her subject. But based off this book, I don’t think crime fiction is the proper place for her to share that. Genuinely moving moments are ruined by sensationalized, histrionic language, and the plot threads are haphazardly woven together. At the end, Rachel “guesses” the solution to the mystery, and is then rewarded by a lengthy monologue in which the antagonist reveals their motivations and plans. Everything is overwritten and overemphasized. This is really not how you would go about crafting a good mystery novel, and taken in combination with the book’s other major failings, it’s just too much.
The intention behind The Unquiet Dead is a good one, but in reality it falls flat in every regard. I am most unimpressed with this.
