The Unquiet Dead (2015) by Ausma Zehanat Khan

Suggested by my audio book store owner, this was a combination mystery and historical novel, a bit like Daniel Silva does with Israeli history. I was not prepared for the intensity of it, and it was about a part of the world - Europe even, where I was unaware of another atrocity, though I lived through it. This time it was about the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia in the early 1990's.

The story is in current day Toronto - for a while it sounded like the places in Canada were further north, but then I realized that Etobicoke and Scarborough were just suburbs of TO - I have friends living in both. What I did not know was that there are bluffs along Lake Ontario. In my youth I walked along Scarborough beaches, but never came across the bluffs. Will have to remember to check them out when I next visit TO.

Back to the story - Christopher Drayton fell off the bluffs and it appears that this was just an accident, so police are not investigating. But Esa Khattak is asked to look into it, as he works with cases involving ethnic minorities, and he asks Rachel Getty to help him. There is an interesting dynamic between the two of them, and she seems like a few other women investigators I have read about, who have an unhappy family life, not much of a social life, so work becomes very important to them. She has a brother that left home seven years ago that she has been trying to locate. Rachel is definitely my favorite character in the book.

There are quite a few colorful characters in this story - Nate, an old friend of Esa's who lives in Drayton's neighborhood, but something seems to be off between Nate and Esa. Then there is Drayton's fiance Mel - a big bosomed money grubber, who doesn't much care for her two girls, except when their loving dad wants to spend time with them. There is a museum opening in the neighborhood commemorating Andalusia, a hisotrically rich part of southern Spain, which is being developed by a librarian named Mink. The girls like to help out there, and Drayton and other neighbors have been interested in supporting the museum with donations. A couple of gardeners keep the gardens blooming. There is some question about Drayton's identity and pulls us into flashback of the horrors of the literal slaughter of the Muslims by Serbs in Srebrenica and other Bosnian towns.

I have to say I was intrigued by the author's first name Ausma. I was wondering if she was a Latvian who married a Muslim. Most biographies of her were very brief, but then in an interview I realized that she definitely did not have a Latvian background. Just a coincidence with names. I will have to check out her other books.