Gothic mystery

I love Barbara Nadel's Cetin Ikmen series of crime novels. Each is an intricately plotted, clever stylish mystery with a wonderful sense of place - Barbara Nadel brings Istanbul, and greater Turkey to life, with its wonderful mix of the prosaic and the exotic.

Pretty Dead Things is another stunning thriller in the series. Cetin Ikmen finds himself revisiting the Istanbul of the hippy trail of the 1960s when investigating a missing persons case. The case becomes more peculiar when a body turns up, in the course of the investigation, very publicly in the centre of Istanbul just as football fans from across Europe are about to descend on the city for the Champions League final.

Darkly humorous and compelling this is a fine, if gruesome, addition to the Ikmen series. I can't recommend it highly enough.