Kati Hirschel Istanbul Murder Mystery

Katie Hirschel is the proud owner of Istanbul's only mystery bookshop. When the director of a film starring an old school friend is found murdered in his hotel Katie starts her own maverick investigation. After all her friend Petra is the police's principal suspect and reading all those detective novels must have taught Katie something.

Kati Hirschel, the owner of Istanbul's only mystery book store, is fed up. It all started when her lover Selim insisted that she behave like the Turkish wife of a respectable lawyer. Looking demure and making witty small talk were the only requirements. Then her landlord announced an outrageous rent increase on her Istanbul apartment. She has no desire to move in with Selim. She'd rather learn the art of bribing government officials in order to find a new place. Kati is offered a large apartment with a view over the Bosphorus at a bargain price. Too good to be true until a man is found murdered there and she becomes the police's prime suspect. In her second novel Esmahan Aykol takes us to the alleys and boulevards of cosmopolitan Istanbul, to posh villas and seedy basement flats, to the property agents and lawyers, to Islamist leaders and city officials-in fact everywhere that baksheesh helps move things along. Esmahan Aykol was born in 1970 in Edirne, Turkey. She lives in Istanbul and Berlin. She has written three Kati Hirschel novels. Baksheesh is the second and has been published in Turkish, German, French, and Italian. The first, Hotel Bosphorus, was published by Bitter Lemon Press in 2011.

Kati owns Istanbul's only mystery book store and, as usual, gets involved in a case that is none of her business. Every day, a beautiful woman lunches alone in the restaurant next to the bookstore. When the woman is found dead in her apartment, Kati immediately recognizes the stranger from the restaurant in images in the newspaper photos. Although the police believe it was an accident, Kati suspects something more sinister has happened. Sani Ankaraligil was an attractive young woman and a politically active ecologist in the middle of a divorce from her wealthy husband. So who would benefit from her death? The industrial companies Sani had accused of polluting the rivers of western Turkey, or her jealous husband seeking revenge through an honor killing, or a Thracian separatist group? The investigation pulls Kati into murkier waters: the marriage may have been a sham, designed to cover up Sani's husband's homosexuality . . . the role of her mother-in-law goes from distasteful to outright criminal.