basics...Two crime novels written by female authors, starring two very different sets of detectives in different locations. In Arabesk Inspectors Suleyman and İkmen investigate the murder of a singer's wife in Istanbul, while in Mourn Not Your Dead Superintendent Kincaid and Sergeant Gemma James try to discover who killed a Police Commander in a small English village.
brilliant...Both books came from crime boxed-sets, and both turned out to be the third in the series featuring these particular detectives. And both were well-written, had intriguing mysteries that didn't feature any really clever twists, and were populated with interesting, real characters. Arabesk was novel in the setting and I was drawn into Nadel's descriptions of Turkish life, into the chain-smoking male detectives, the old-fashioned-yet-modern male-female relationships, and the differences between different peoples and their backgrounds. It didn't feel like this was just a murder mystery that happened to be set in Istanbul, rather because it was set there it opened up new possibilities for motives, for character interaction and for extraneous detail. Crombie's more 'traditional' tale of sleepy village life, where everyone knows each others' business rises above stereotypes with a realistic central duo, Kincaid and Gemma (interesting that's he's always identified by surname and she by first name) who shared a sexual relationship in the last book that creates all sorts of tensions in this story.
but...
As I noted above, neither story has a revelation that surprised me or came out of the blue, in contrast to The Dead of Jericho, and so the pay offs felt a little flat, even though they were real. The resolution to Mourn Not Your Dead was the more pedestrian in terms of the murder investigation, the personal relationships were more interesting.
briefly...
Two solid novels that capture their worlds wonderfully and feature fallible, credible detective heroes whose further adventures I'd be happy to follow.
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