Urban, Simon:Plan D : Imagine a World in Which the Berlin Wall Never Fell..
- Taschenbuch 2008, ISBN: 9781846556920
Gollancz. Good. 5.08 x 0.91 x 7.72 inches. Paperback. 2008. 356 pages. <br>Part mystery, part speculative fiction, and wholly unforgettable, Jon Courtenay Grimwood's celebrated… Mehr…
Gollancz. Good. 5.08 x 0.91 x 7.72 inches. Paperback. 2008. 356 pages. <br>Part mystery, part speculative fiction, and wholly unforgettable, Jon Courtenay Grimwood's celebrated Arabesk serie s portrays the dark, hard-boiled story of a man out to prove his innocence in an alternate world where the facts aren't always the same as the truth . . . and murder isn't the worst that can happ en. It's a twenty-first century hauntingly familiar-and yet star tlingly different from our own. Here the United States brokered a deal that ended World War I, and the Ottoman Empire never collap sed. And lording it over all sits the complex, seductive, and blo odthirsty North African metropolis of El Iskandryia. Almost nothi ng is what it seems to be in El Isk, and Ashraf Bey is no excepti on. Neither the rich Ottoman aristocrat everyone thinks he is, nor the minor street criminal once shipped off to prison when he fell foul of his Chinese Triad employers-the fact is that Raf has as little idea who he is as anyone else. With few clues and no money, all Raf has is a surname hinting at noble heritage and an arranged marriage to a woman who hates him. But nothing Ashraf a l Mansur learns about himself is as unexpected-or as terrifying-a s the brutal murder he's accused of committing. Now, as a hunted man with the welfare of a precocious young girl in his irresponsi ble hands, Raf must race after a killer through an unforgiving ci ty as foreign to him as the truth he'll uncover about himself. E ditorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly In this clever first boo k of a trilogy that blends alternative SF and hard-boiled mystery from British author Grimwood (Lucifer's Dragon, etc.), ZeeZee, w ho has spent his youth largely in boarding schools and in trouble , is also Ashraf al-Mansur, though that identity is unknown to hi m. Whisked away from a Seattle prison, ZeeZee is transported to E l Iskandryia, an exotic, exquisitely detailed North African city. Whether Ashraf or ZeeZee, he's adaptable but not compliant. The world of wealth and privilege he's expected to accept without que stion comes with strings he's not to question either, like marria ge to the willful Zara. Misunderstanding and mishandling his prec arious situation, Ashraf becomes prime suspect in a murder, on th e lam with only a vague understanding of where he is and who he i s supposed to be. He's not only responsible for his own fate but also, surprisingly, the sole protector of a young girl. Grimwood artfully unveils the changed world that has developed in the many decades since WWI ended differently. Ashraf, a lifelong underdog and pawn, emerges as a resourceful and deadly foe, adapting quic kly to survive in a game where the rules and the playing field sh ift repeatedly. SF and mystery fans will be pleased. Copyright ? Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavail able edition of this title. Review All brilliant light and scorc hing heat . . . Grimwood has successfully mingled fantasy with re ality to make an unusual, believable, and absorbing mystery. -Sun day Telegraph A mature balance between sensibility and action in what's essentially a rite of passage story allied with a detecti ve thriller-deftly told and laced with neat ideas. -Time Out Nea r perfect. -Murder One --This text refers to an out of print or u navailable edition of this title. About the Author Jon Courtenay Grimwood lives in England. The first book in his acclaimed Arabe sk series, Pashazade, was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Aw ard, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Inside Flap Part mystery, part speculative fiction, and wholly unforgettable, Jon Courtenay Grimwood's celebrated Arabesk series portrays the dark , hard-boiled story of a man out to prove his innocence in an alt ernate world where the facts aren't always the same as the truth . . . and murder isn't the worst that can happen. It's a twenty- first century hauntingly familiar-and yet startlingly different f rom our own. Here the United States brokered a deal that ended Wo rld War I, and the Ottoman Empire never collapsed. And lording it over all sits the complex, seductive, and bloodthirsty North Afr ican metropolis of El Iskandryia. Almost nothing is what it seems to be in El Isk, and Ashraf Bey is no exception. Neither the ri ch Ottoman aristocrat everyone thinks he is, nor the minor street criminal once shipped off to prison when he fell foul of his Chi nese Triad employers-the fact is that Raf has as little idea who he is as anyone else. With few clues and no money, all Raf has i s a surname hinting at noble heritage and an arranged marriage to a woman who hates him. But nothing Ashraf al Mansur learns about himself is as unexpected-or as terrifying-as the brutal murder h e's accused of committing. Now, as a hunted man with the welfare of a precocious young girl in his irresponsible hands, Raf must r ace after a killer through an unforgiving city as foreign to him as the truth he'll uncover about himself. --This text refers to a n out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. ? Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One 6th Ju ly The sound of fountains came in stereo. A deep splash from the courtyard below and a lighter trickle from the next room, where open arches cut in a wall overlooking the courtyard had marble ba lustrades stretched between matching pillars. It was that kind o f house. Old, historic, near-derelict in places. Ambient temp e ighty-one Fahrenheit, humidity sixty-two per cent . . . The Ameri can spoke clearly, reading the data from the face of his watch, t hen glanced through a smashed window to what little he could see of the sky outside. Passing cloud, no direct sunlight. Dropping clumsily onto one knee, Felix Abrinsky touched the marble floor with nicotine-stained fingers, confirming to himself that this st atement was correct. The tiles were warm but not hot. No latent h eat had been stored up from that morning's sunshine to radiate ba ck into the afternoon air. Bizarrely, it took Felix less effort to stand than it had done to kneel, though he needed to pause to catch his breath all the same. And the silver-ringed hand that ca me up to wipe sweat from his forehead only succeeded in smearing grease across his scalp and down his thinning ponytail. Police r egulations demanded he wear a face mask, surgical gloves and--in his case--a sweatband to stop himself from accidentally polluting biological evidence. But Felix was Chief of Detectives and so fa r as he was concerned that meant he could approach the crime scen e how he liked, which was loose, casual and lateral. Not to menti on semi-drunk. All the virtues that first got him thrown out of t he police in Los Angeles. Besides, if you wanted to talk about s hould have been, then he should have been onholiday. And he would have managed it, too, if this particular buck hadn't been bumped up the line so fast it practically hit the wall parking itself r ight outside his office door. The body in the chair was fresh, s till warm to his touch. Stiffness had set in to the arms--but the n, rigor happened fast when a victim was borderline anorexic. And even without the woman's thinness there was North Africa's heat to add into the equation. Heat always upped the rate at which rig or gripped a corpse. On his arrival Felix had considered obtaini ng an immediate body temperature. But habit made him do the crime -scene grabs first, then work a grid through the victim's office, tweezering up clues. And technically, since she was obviously de ad, he'd already broken his own regulations by checking under her jaw for a carotid pulse. Covering the body prior to site shots. Some cities used electronic observers, 360-degree fish-eye vids , wired for movement and sound. El Iskandryia used the human kind , when it bothered to use observers at all. The silksuit Felix ha d selected stood in the doorway, doing exactly what he'd been tol d, which was shut up and stay out of the way. From a foil packet Felix extracted a sheet of tissue-thin gauze designed to protect the woman's modesty in death, as surely as a scarf round her hea d would have hidden her hair on the streets in life. Except there was no scarf, because the woman had been stabbed in her own hous e, at her own desk, in her own office . . . Starting location sh ots, said the fat man and lifted an old Speed Graphic. The camera was linked to his even more ancient LAPD-issue chronograph, whic h would back up each shot as it was taken, just as the camera wou ld automatically stamp time, date and orientation across the bott om edge of each new shot. 15.30: July 6: SouthSouthWest. All the same, Felix dictated a description of what he was doing, work ing fast to photograph the little office from every angle. Only w hen this was done could he start work on the body. Exposure five . Al-Mansur madersa. Upstairs. Interior. West wall and corner of office taken from door. Speed Graphic Digilux. Fifty-millimetre l ens. K400-equivalence. The dictation did no more than tell the c ourt what camera had been used, what the shot showed and what the light was like: something the camera readouts told them anyway. But he'd learned his craft back when Speed Graphics still took ac etate and defence attorneys jumped on any conflict of technical i nformation, no matter how small. And besides, Felix spoke not rea lly to his camera or watch but to himself. These days defence at torneys weren't an issue. If the Chief of Detectives said someone had committed a crime that was usually good enough for a judge. The suspect went down. Unfortunately it had taken Felix a few mon ths to realize this and there were three cases from his early day s in El Iskandryia which still gave him sleepless nights--four ca ses, if he was being unusually hard on himself. Exposure eleven. Al-Mansur madersa. Upstairs. Interior. Open door to office, take n from broken mashrabiya window in south wall adjacent to Rue She rif . . . Mashrabiyas were, originally, shaded balconies where w ater jugs could be left to cool. But the term had long since come to signify both the balcony and the ornately carved screen that hid those in the balcony from the street below. Marble was common place for the screen, as was gilded or painted wood. The smashed mashrabiya at the al-Mansur madersa had been carved two hundred years before from a single slab of alabaster and now lay in shard s on the floor, apparently kicked in from outside. That the balco ny was fifteen feet above a traffic-laden street only made the br eak-in more unlikely. Unless one factored in the Thiergarten who apparently could move unseen, kill silently and climb walls like flies . . . Felix sighed. Whatever else Berlin had to buy for it s agents abroad, their deadly reputation came free. Officially, of course, Berlin was El Iskandryia's ally. Merely an equal partn er in a bigger, three-way alliance with Stambul and Paris. Unoffi cially, French influence kept itself to Morocco, while Berlin's a dvisers flooded the rest of the littoral and Stambul banked its t aking from the Suez Canal and did pretty much what it was told. Politics--now there was one subject Felix spent a lot of time try ing to avoid. Grunting crossly, the fat man wiped fresh sweat fr om his face and grabbed two shots of a ridiculous rag dog, quite out of keeping with the cold elegance of the Khedivian desk on wh ich it sat. And then, having put off what came next for long eno ugh, Felix turned his camera on the corpse. Exposure thirteen. A l-Mansur madersa. Upstairs. Interior. The body, taken from front of desk . . . Felix whipped off the modesty cloth and took his se cond look at the dead woman's wounds. They were no more pleasant than the first time round. Once started, he worked swiftly on th e crime grabs, moving in to get specific shots of the ripped-open blouse, the nails broken on one hand, the trickle of blood dried to a stark black ribbon down her side. The woman was in her ear ly forties. Middle height. Brown eyes staring blankly at the ceil ing. Short, expensively cut black hair--elegant, obviously. The v ery fact her eyes were clear and the cornea unclouded told Felix that she was less than six hours dead, but he knew that anyway an d put her death at two hours ago at the most. One of her elbows was flopped across the arm of her chair and her head had tipped r ight back, the muscle relaxation that precedes rigor having smoot hed her face until it looked more serene in death than it ever di d in life: infinitely more serene than it did glaring out from th at afternoon's Iskandryian open on the desk in front of her. Ber lin furious as society widow slams RenSchmiss. And those in El I skandryia's German community who believed in the legal right to s lash open each other's face for the sake of highly-prized duellin g scars had slammed right back, from the look of things . . . Pun ching a button on the side of his Speed Graphic, Felix reduced th e depth of field until it showed only what he wanted the judge to see. The injuries in sharp focus. To him the victim was no long er human: that was where he differed both from his boss and under lings--and from Madame Mila, the coroner, who would already be on her way. To them, what slumped in that chair was still a woman. Deserving all the respect and modesty that the law allowed. Whic h was why Felix had put the rest of his day on hold to make it to the scene of the crime first. Back in the City of Angels, where Felix had trained, he'd have grabbed a few more corpse shots, lif ted dabs, collected up handleable bio like hair and stashed it in evidence bags and then vacuumed the victim's clothes, one garmen t at a time, again putting the dust into separate sachets. And t hen, with the victim's original position recorded beyond all poss ible doubt, he'd have had a medical technician take the body some place near but non-critical and remove the clothes so Felix coul d photograph the naked corpse, wound by wound and bruise by bruis e. But that wasn't the way crime against women was handled in El Iskandryia. At least not officially, and this, regrettably, was unquestionably a very official crime. The victim had once been ma rried to an important man, there were rumours that she was badly in debt--to whom, nobody seemed to know--and she'd been outspoken enough to upset the young khedive's German advisors. This was t he kind of crime that require, Gollancz, 2008, 2.5, Penguin Random House. Used - Good. Ships from the UK. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages., Penguin Random House, 2.5<
