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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Engaging, atmospheric mystery!, January 31, 2012
This review is from: The Golden Scales: A Makana Mystery (Hardcover)
The Golden Scales is not just a mystery novel; it is much more. The book's basic plot stems from the two mysterious disappearances, but the author develops this into a full-fledged almost literary novel touching upon subjects from personal upheaval to public politics to Islamic philosophy. Bilal builds up Makana's character beautifully; we know Makana as he is now and we delve into his past. We understand why he is what he is, and the events that have shaped him. Makana is a strong protagonist, down but not out, bearing the courage to stand and press on for what is right. This book, as strongly built-up as it is, is quite unforgettable because of Makana. Bilal also describes Egypt well - it's people, it's locales, it's vernacular language, and the political influences that shape the region. As readers we are able to get a good virtual look-seee around.As Makana goes about investigating he meets all sorts of people - football stars, film producers, politicians, struggling actresses, land sharks, Russian gangsters - each person for himself, wanting, grasping. Each of the characters in the book is well depicted, from their back-stories and their connections to the missing people, to their own motivations for the crimes. I loved the fact that even while this was a mystery novel, I got a sense of the socio-political climate, the life of ordinary people, the quality of women's lives and the ever-present corruption; the mystery didn't exist in isolation, it stemmed from it's society and it's culture and the nature of it's people. This is an engrossing book, an atmospheric mystery and an engaging piece of fiction. I hope to read many more Makana mysteries. Highly recommended.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The psychological portrait of a city in crime, February 12, 2012
This review is from: The Golden Scales: A Makana Mystery (Hardcover)
This book could be read as a melancholy song for Cairo. The author, using a simple case of a disappearance, or maybe abduction, for his starting point, he travels the reader back in time and he show-lights to him the everyday life of the Egyptian capital. He does that in a somewhat light way, using a sense of humor that borders to irony, but that's not enough to hide the reality; a reality that's as bleak as the lives of the poor people in the country.
So, he talks about dirty cops and corrupted state officials, who have a lot of close ties with the rich the powerful, about the new dirty money that has been laundered in the country for the sake of some questionable characters from the former Soviet Union, and which allows certain people to make or to follow their own rules, about the city poor whose lives get from bad to worse, about the rich that reside in huge fortress-like houses, choosing to ignore all the suffering in the streets, and about the fear and the darkness that surrounds the local show biz, the sex and the drugs trade.
This novel reminds me of a crime story and a social commentary at the same time, and it's just as well that it does, if I may add. The epicenter of the plot is not so much the crime, as is the society in which it took place. A society, that back then, in 1998, was just as divided as it is now.
It all begins when some bodyguards of sorts, arrive at the boat where Makana, an ex-cop from the Sudan and now refugee lives. The men simply state to him that he has to follow them because their boss wants to meet him, and he just obeys, since he knows too well that he has no word in the matter anyway. As he'll soon come to find out, the boss is none other than Saad Hanafi, a man rumored to be so rich as to own the biggest part of the aristocratic suburb of Heliopolis. Makana knows Hanafi is one of those men that "sell dreams", one of which is his football team, the most popular in Egypt. Now he wants him, of all people, to discover the whereabouts of Adil Romario, the biggest star of the team, who's gone missing ten days ago. Makana, though reluctantly, accepts the mission, since he could really use some money right now, and of that his new employer has aplenty.
Thus he starts his investigation; an investigation that will bring him time and again face to face with danger, but which will also lead him into some of the most infamous streets of the city, into dens and into luxurious establishments, and that will also make him realize that the people who really cared about Romario were but a few; most of the ones who knew him actually were not that hurt that he was gone. As the case will start getting more and more complicated and the good detective will find himself moving from one dead end to the next, something else will happen that will complicate things even more; he'll meet a woman from England, who's been searching for the last seventeen years for her missing daughter and who'll soon end up dead, murdered perhaps by the very same man who took her child. But who would that be? That's the big question that Makana sets himself to find the answer to.
This is a very good crime novel, written in a nice straightforward manner, and which travels the reader to some places that look familiar and strange at the same time. The author seems not only to pen the psychological profiles of his characters, but of a whole city as well. And he talks about that city's essence, the one which as foreigners to its culture, we are by ourselves unable to see. A job well done.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A most remarkable novel, February 8, 2012
This review is from: The Golden Scales: A Makana Mystery (Hardcover)
I have just read a most remarkable novel called THE GOLDEN SCALES. And as the cover hastens to tell you, it's "A Makana Mystery" (more on that in a minute) by Parker Bilal. The Parker Bilal of the credits is a pseudonym for Jamal Mahjoub, a critically acclaimed author of several works of fiction who brings his considerable literary chops to bear upon the thriller genre without missing a beat. THE GOLDEN SCALES is a tale that is told in the story's "present" (approximately 1998) but is very much influenced by what has occurred in the past. It is comprised of two stories that begin separately and slowly intersect within the narration. The setting for the novel is the city of Cairo, a place of desperate poverty and incalculable wealth, and one in which street tensions roil uneasily 24 hours a day and people disappear officially and otherwise. Makana is a Sudanese expatriate, a former police officer who wore out his welcome in his native country and now ekes out a hardscrabble existence as a private investigator, operating his office from a restaurant and living on a boat that threatens to fall apart if someone walks on the wrong side of it. There is no mistaking Makana for Travis McGee, once one gets past the "rumpled knight" comparison. Makana is inexplicably retained by Saad Hanafi, a legendary Cairo entrepreneur whose fortune was acquired by strong-arm activities but who now functions as a semi-legitimate businessman through a number of diversified businesses. Hanafi owns the DreemTeem, a popular soccer team whose star player has disappeared. Adil Romario has not been seen for weeks, having appeared to vanish off the streets of Cairo, other than for the posters and seemingly innumerable products that bear his image and endorsement. At the same time, there is a second story, one that concerns a half-mad English woman whose visit to Cairo in 1981 ended in tragedy when her four-year-old daughter was kidnapped. The woman has made annual pilgrimages to the city in an attempt to locate her daughter. But shortly after a chance meeting with Makana in 1998, she is found brutally murdered in the very hotel room from where her daughter was abducted. Makana feels a kinship with the woman for several reasons, not the least of which is his own tragic past that is slowly but steadily revealed throughout the book's narration. Still,, Makana cannot escape the feeling that his investigation into Romario's disappearance is somehow tied into the disappearance of the woman's daughter some 17 years before. Makana's investigations --- one for hire, the other on his own --- take him on a perilous course through Cairo's alleys and thoroughfares, and ultimately into a direct confrontation with his own past. His presence in Cairo is a tenuous one at best, and there is always the possibility that he will be extradited back to Sudan, where death is all but a certainty for him. Hanafi, as wealthy and powerful as he is, has enemies whose combined might equals his, so that his foes become Makana's during the course of the investigation. While at least one of the puzzles facing Makana will be predictable to mystery aficionados, surprises abound nonetheless. Further, the opportunity to watch Makana, a good man in a very bad place, maneuver himself through the dangers of one of the world's most exotic cities is worth the price of admission all by itself. Bilal by any name is an enthralling scribe, one who is able to write beautifully without sacrificing excitement. There is one vignette near the book's conclusion wherein Makana faces a peril that Ian Fleming might have dreamed up for his own fabled creation. Danger abounds throughout THE GOLDEN SCALES, whether as a presence in a room or a lurking inference just around the next corner. If the cover legend "A Makana Mystery" portends more to come from Bilal, I will be there. And you should be, too. Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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