THE SNAKE STONE

This was my first introduction to Yashim the Eunuch, already featured in The Janissary Tree and, sometime this year in The Bellini Card. This, the second in the series, is a story full of intrigue, set in the Istanbul of the 1830s. in this ancient city, Turkish now but built on Greek and Roman foundations, the sultan is dying, the markets rife with rumour, and there is a problem with the water supply, the fountains are drying up. Nothing in a crime novel is irrelevant and no event discrete. 

Violence flares on the first page with a vicious attack on a market trader. A French archaeologist of dubious antecedents arrives in town. A Greek bookseller makes a sale. The market trader supplied Yashim with the vegetables, the Greek sold him books. The lives of the Frenchman and the eunuch will become so involved that when the Westerner is found horribly mutilated in an alley Yashim is the prime suspect. For the police it’s a chinch, but the huge cast of characters provide Yashim with a deep pool in which to angle for the killer and clear his name, even save his life. 

Through the maze of nationalities, occupations, creeds and gender, Yashim weaves a tortuous route, teasing information from the sultan’s mother, cajoling a mute Albanian child, fencing with the English doctor, recruiting a troupe of transsexual dancers. Inevitably he falls victim not only to violence as he draws close to the killer, but, more surprisingly, to the wiles of the ravishing window of the murdered Frenchman. The climax is played out in the black depths of the ancient water works below the city’s paving stones.