Kamil Pasha

The Ottoman Empire is plagued by thefts of antiquities from mosques and churches. Within days, the lost objects appear for sale in Europe. Among them is a reliquary presumed lost for 400 years and around which an elaborate, mysterious sect has grown. In Istanbul, magistrate Kamil Pasha is under pressure to break the smuggling ring amid rising tensions between Christians and Muslims. He confronts a mysterious adversary who will stop at nothing to get the reliquary first. With the Balkans aflame and Kamil's personal life in upheaval, the search into the old neighborhoods where Istanbul's crime rings reside may cost Kamil not only his position but also his life. The Abyssinian Proof re-creates the gritty underworld of a dying empire.

January 1888. Vera Arti carries The Communist Manifesto in Armenian through Istanbul's streets, unaware of the men following her. When the police discover a shipload of guns and the Imperial Ottoman Bank is blown up, suspicion falls on a socialist commune Arti's friends organized in the eastern mountains. Special Prosecutor Kamil Pasha is called in to investigate. He soon encounters his most ruthless adversary to date: Vahid, head of a special branch of the secret police, who has convinced the sultan that the commune is leading a secessionist movement and should be destroyed-along with surrounding villages. Kamil must stop the massacre, but he finds himself on the wrong side of the law, framed for murder and accused of treason, his family and the woman he loves threatened. Exploring the dark obsessions of the most powerful and dangerous men of the dying Ottoman Empire, The Winter Thief also reflects the mad idealism of those turbulent times.