Publication Date: March 15, 2010 | Series: Kamil Pasha Novels
A bank robbery and illegal weapons lead Kamil Pasha to uncover a plan to massacre an entire valley.
January 1888. Vera Arti carries The Communist Manifesto in Armenian through Istanbul’s streets, unaware of the men following her. When the police discover a shipload of guns and the Imperial Ottoman Bank is blown up, suspicion falls on a socialist commune Arti’s friends organized in the eastern mountains. Special Prosecutor Kamil Pasha is called in to investigate. He soon encounters his most ruthless adversary to date: Vahid, head of a special branch of the secret police, who has convinced the sultan that the commune is leading a secessionist movement and should be destroyed—along with surrounding villages. Kamil must stop the massacre, but he finds himself on the wrong side of the law, framed for murder and accused of treason, his family and the woman he loves threatened.
Exploring the dark obsessions of the most powerful and dangerous men of the dying Ottoman Empire, The Winter Thief also reflects the mad idealism of those turbulent times.
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*Starred Review* The nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, in the throes of political upheaval, again provides the vividly realized background for this third mystery featuring Special Prosecutor Kamil Pasha. White demonstrates her in-depth knowledge of Turkish history in a deftly plotted and clever tale of intrigue, duplicity, and violence. The disappearance of illegal firearms, an explosion, a bank heist, and a deadly fire are just the beginning of a case that demands all of Kamil’s personal and professional resources. When Vahid, the scheming and sadistic head of the secret police, discovers the presence of Armenian communists in the area, his actions lead to a bloody massacre and near war. As Kamil and the police attempt to squelch rumors of rebellion and expose the true criminals, threats carried out on his family and against his livelihood render this case personal and deeply upsetting. The tension between self-preservation and ethical behavior (White masterfully forces her fully fleshed characters to make moral decisions in seemingly impossible circumstances) drives the story, but the presence of a depraved yet compelling villain and the immediacy of the setting (veiled women, bad hospitals, faulty weaponry, poor roads, noise, heat, danger) also contribute to what is White’s best book to date. A must-read for fans of Katie Hickman’s The Aviary Gate (2008) and Jane Johnson’s The Tenth Gift (2008). --Jen Baker
Jenny White is a writer and a social anthropologist. Her first novel, The Sultan's Seal, was published in 2006. It was translated into fourteen languages and is available as a paperback and audiobook. Booklist has named it one of the top ten first novels of 2006 and one of the top ten historical novels of 2006. It was shortlisted for the 2006 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award. The sequel, The Abyssinian Proof, was published in February 2008 (W. W. Norton) and a third Kamil Pasha novel, The Winter Thief, in 2010.
Jenny White was born in southern Germany and emigrated to the United States at the age of seven. She lived in New Rochelle, NY, where she learned English and attended grammar and high school. She studied at Lehman College in the Bronx, part of the City University of New York that had been set up for immigrant children. Working her way through school, she has held a variety of jobs. At various times, she has been a telephone operator, bookkeeper, librarian, file clerk, language teacher, receptionist, patient associate in a clinic, copyeditor, research assistant, teaching assistant, tour coordinator, professor, and now novelist. While at Lehman College, she studied abroad in Germany, where she first met people from Turkey, from which sprang a lifelong interest. After finishing college, she traveled to Turkey and stayed for three years, eventually earning a Master's degree in psychology from Hacettepe University in Ankara. After working for a couple of years in Montana, she moved to Texas to begin graduate work in anthropology, specializing in Turkey. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.
Jenny White now teaches social anthropology at Boston University as a tenured associate professor. She has published three scholarly books on contemporary Turkey. Money Makes Us Relatives, a description of women's labor in urban Turkey in the 1980s, was published in 1994. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey was published in 2002. It explains the rise of Islamic politics in Turkey in the 1990s and won the 2003 Douglass Prize for best book in Europeanist anthropology. Her latest book (November 2012), Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, takes a look at the transformations that Turkish Islam and secularism -- and the idea of the nation -- have undergone in the past decade. What is behind Turkey's leap to international prominence, and what should we make of it? Jenny White lives in the Boston area.
"I learned English as a second language, primarily from books. This nurtured my relationship with language and made books my friends. As long as I can remember, I've wanted to be a writer. From my earliest days of learning English, I carried around a notebook in which I sketched the world in words. However, I also had a bent for science, so opportunity and curiosity took me in that direction, to graduate school and a career as an anthropologist. Over the years, the two desires merged, as my scholarly writing became more and more literary (although not fictional), and my experience in Turkey and knowledge of Turkish culture and history infused my fiction writing."
Jenny White's novel's just get better and better. I read this in manuscript form, and could not put it down. Beginning with a daring bank robbery, the pace keeps up through the novel, tying all kinds of disparate threads together at the end and letting you inside the lives of multiple interesting characters.
While looking for novels set in Turkey, I discovered Jenny White and her two Kamil Pasha novels. I not only loved her charachers but also the way in which she put the reader into the world of Istanbul at the end of the Ottoman Empire. Now a third book has been published. It may be my favorite. Jenny White is a not to be missed. Enjoy!
The Ottoman Empire has long been a place where Christians, Moslems and Jews can live together in safety and Magistrate Kamil Pasha values that and wants to preserve the empire. But other nations lust over rich Ottoman provinces, and internally, a struggle for power weakens the empire. When the Ottoman bank is robbed and dynamited, Kamil is called upon to solve the crime--but the head of the secret police organization is convinced he already knows the criminals--terrorist Armenians who hope to fund a revolution.
Hamstrung by weak support from his superiors, opposition from the secret police, and concerned both about the woman he loves and his missing brother-in-law, Kamil nevertheless investigates--until he is framed for murder. He uncovers evidence that a socialistic utopian group is attempting to set up a community in Ottoman-Armenian soil and that they may be behind both a gun smuggling plot and the robbery. But he doesn't believe they represent the revolutionary threat the secret police describe.
On the Sultan's orders, Kamil travels to Trabzon, and Armenian territories to investigate rumors of an impending revolt. There he finds that the secret police and Kurdish irregulars are stirring up exactly the kind of revolt the Sultan feared.
Author Jenny White creates a vivid picture of Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. Kamil finds himself trying to make the best choices in an environment where strict adherence to the law might result in slaughter of thousands. Vahid, head of the secret police, is a devious and angry antagonist driven both by ambition and by his hopes for revenge. The leaders of the socialist community are believably naive, willing to commit vast crimes in the belief that they are bringing in a wonderful new world. White is at her best when she's writing her deeply disturbed female characters. Kamil's sister seeks her missing husband while wondering if he was unfaithful to her, socialist Vera tries to find a publisher for an Armenian translation of The Communist Manifesto, to the deeply disturbed and homicidal Elif whom Kamil loves but who suffers repercussions from the murder of her husband and son.
White may have relied a bit much on coincidence, and I would have liked Vahid to be a bit more rational in his attempt to become the power behind the throne. But White's strong writing, the intriguing characters, and the wonderful setting in the declining days of the Ottoman Empire add up to a book that was hard to put down.
