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THE UNQUIET DEAD
by Ausma Zehanat Khan
Minotaur Books, January 2015
344 pages
$25.99
ISBN: 1250055113


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Detectives Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty appear on the face of things to be an oddly matched pair. A second generation Canadian Muslim, he is ten years her senior and has had a distinguished career first on Toronto's homicide squad, then in counter-intelligence, and now, finally, as head of the (fictional) Canadian Community Policing section (CPS), a federal task force dealing with sensitive cases involving minority issues across Canada. Rachel, on the other hand, almost lost her job when she blew the whistle on her former boss. Khattak was impressed, however, with the quality of her police work and offered her a job on his task force. Although they are very different in personality, they get along very well.

But the present case they are working begins as a bit of a puzzle. They have been especially requested to look further into the death of one Christopher Drayton, who fell from a cliff in Scarborough Ontario, and whose death had been ruled accidental. Rachel initially imagines that Khattak is doing a private favour for a friend of the wealthy Drayton, since the case in no way appears to fit into the remit of the CPS. It is not very long, however, until they learn that Drayton's real name may well have been Dražen Krstić, a notorious war criminal, responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Muslims during the Bosnian War in the 1990s.

But how is this possible? Drayton had been interested in the neighbouring small private Andalusia Museum, dedicated to celebrating a golden age in Spanish history, the seven hundred years when Moors, Christians, and Jews lived together in harmony to the mutual benefit of all. Why would a mass murderer of Muslims support such a project?

As Khattak and Rachel continue their investigation, the list of possible suspects grows wider. There is Drayton's lover, a bizarrely hyper-sexual blonde who has an eye on Drayton's fortune. There is her ex-husband, who wants custody of their two daughters and who is buckling under the strain of alimony payments. And of course, if he is Krstić, then there are any number of survivors of the Bosnian conflict who have ample reason to want him dead.

Drayton had been receiving an evocative series of written communications in the period before his death, snippets of which he stored in his safe. These, in italics, run through the narrative and appear as chapter headings. A set that appears very early in the book will give an idea of their tenor and tone:

As you took everything from me, you asked if I was afraid.

How could I not be afraid?

Do you hear as we did the starved wolves howling in the night?

Do you feel as though you'd never been alive?

Can you right all the wrongs of the past? Because I tell you that the sky is too high and the ground is too hard.

The voices in these fragments, many of them drawn from the testimonies of survivors and fully documented in an appendix, are the voices of the unquiet dead of the title. They are the dead of Srebenica and other places in Bosnia who were massacred by Serbian army units in 1995, while a Dutch UN peacekeeping unit stood helplessly by. (Last year, the Netherlands was found liable in the deaths of at least some of the Bosniaks and required to pay compensation.) Khattak and Rachel must uncover what it is about Drayton that has attracted the flood of heart-wrenching memories that he has so carefully stored away.

This book is about memories, memories that are polar opposites, but that are both true and both forgotten at our peril. The glowing dream of Andalusia, of a harmony among adherents of different religious and perhaps those professiong none, must be retained along with the nightmare of the undeserved, unmitigated suffering that occurred in Srebenica. Neither can be allowed to obscure the other, but maintaining the balance is incredibly hard. Dr Ausma Zehanat Khan, who holds a PhD in international human rights law, has managed the feat brilliantly and beautifully in her debut novel.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, February 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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