The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan – a review BLOG TOUR

I was delighted to receive a copy of The Unquiet Dead from No Exit Press and be part of the blog tour for this interesting novel by Ausma Zehanat Khan.

The Unquiet Dead is a novel that almost has two halves, although they are inextricably linked. It’s difficult to review without using clichés but there really is no other word to describe the story other than powerful. I didn’t skip through the book desperate to find out the end as I so often do with stories. This was a novel I had to read slowly both in order to keep the large number of characters and situations straight in my head, but also because of the incredibly emotional prose that was written.

In The Unquiet Dead Toronto Detective Rachel Getty is asked by her boss Esa Khattak to look into the seemingly accidental death of Christopher Drayton who was found dead at the bottom of Scarborough Cliffs. Usually the cases that the team handle are related to crimes against minorities so she is unsure why they are involved.  However Rachel is happy that she is being included after having faced issues within some of the other teams she has worked for. When the detectives discover that Christopher Drayton may have been living under an assumed name she soon realises that the case is a lot more complicated than first seen. The second story focuses on the atrocities in Srebrenica during the 1995 massacre and we are given insight into what happened from the eyes of young boys living through it.

Whilst I would definitely recommend this novel, for me the actual detectives were rather flat. For some reason personally I didn’t get a whole lot of feeling about them and felt it was a little ‘off’. Rachel is a young woman yet despite having a good job continues to live with parents she doesn’t really like which seemed a bit strange. It almost felt that too much had been shoehorned into the book. There was a lot of description of the atrocities, which were then tempered with detailed background of the characters (often the issue with debut novels when the author wants to tell us everything).

Yet despite this slight issue, I did enjoy the story. It was interesting to learn about a period of history that although it happened in my lifetime I have to confess to knowing little about. I enjoyed the writing style and felt despite the heavy topic it was not a hard read. 

I would thoroughly recommend this novel especially if you enjoy learning about history during your reading.