THE PROPHET MURDERS

Istanbul: once we used to dream of the freedom of its seraglios, but the Ottoman Empire has been gone for many a year. If the city has any attractions today they lie in its transvestite clubs – entertainment, company, gossip, and perhaps a friend at the end of the evening. That is for the customers. If you are a peasant in Anatolia who knows that you are not as your brothers are, then the chance of working in the clubs is your way out of the fields. Like TVs from the other side of the Atlantic, you will pluck your eyebrows on the way and change your name. No one might know the new you in the Hop-Ciki-Yaya world that is the background to Mehmet Murat Somer’s thrillers.           

“Hop-Ciki-Yaya” is a Turkish cheerleaders’ chant that has become a byword for the Tranvestite-gay sub-culture of Istanbul, and this first English translation is the sixth of Somer’s series set in that world. (The fifth, The Kiss Murders, seems to be the next due for British publication. The USA will have to make do with imports until next year for any of them. The Istanbul Copyright Agency has a web-page dedicated to all Somer’s books, though in an English rather more strangled than Kenneth Dakan’s translation, at http://www.istanbultelifofisi.com/writer_detail.asp?ID=1).          

Narrator Burcak is a queen of the night, club owner, worshipped by her (“her” even though Burcak is an intact male) staff, gay and straight, never sure whether even the taxi drivers don’t fancy her, weight watcher, internet message board moderator, and almost inevitable trap for trouble. Mass murder seems to follow her. However, killers are not necessarily who they might be suspected to be.           

Take the troll who is ruining her TV message board with his postings threatening Islamic punishments on all who do not follow the true way and who engage in pollution and lives of misdeeds. He is something else when Burcak finally discovers his whereabouts 

No one, though, in Burcak’s world is who he or she is thought to be: to enter it the girls have had to change their name while leaving much else behind. When a series of bodies starts to appear, some recent, some dead for several years, all killed in unpleasant and unique ways, there seem to be no connection until Burcak looks back at the victim’s previous worldly names – each had the name of a prophet (Jonah, Moses, Noah, Salih) and each died in a way connected to their namesake (Jonah in water, for instance). With the passing of time, each victim seems to have had more connection with Burcak’s nightclub and concerns about staffing levels, let alone customers or justice, mean she has to investigate further.