Barbara Nadel

"When a brutal murder takes place in Istanbul's run-down Jewish quarter, eccentric Inspector Cetin Ikmen is assigned to the case by the Turkish police and pursues a labyrinthine plot throughout the area's back alleys.

Any bloody death will lead Inspectors Cetin Ikmen and Mehmet Süleyman out onto the dark streets of Istanbul. On 21 January, a half-decapitated corpse in the poor multicultural disctrict of Tarlabasi poses a particularly frustrating and gruesome mystery. But as the months pass and the violence increases, it turns into a hunt for that rare phenomenon in the golden city on the Bosphorus: a serial killer. Desperate to uncover the killer's twisted logic...