Kismet

Publishers Weekly

Hard-boiled detective fans should welcome German author Arjouni's U.S. debut, the fourth book in his popular series (Happy Birthday, Turk! etc.) featuring Kemal Kayankaya, a wisecracking Turkish immigrant PI. When a ruthless gang calling itself the Army of Reason demands 6,000 marks a month from a Frankfurt restaurateur acquaintance of Kemal's, Kemal and his sidekick, Slibulsky, wind up in a gun battle that leaves two thugs dead. In 2001, the year this novel was first published, Balkan refugees were streaming into Frankfurt. Kemal must deal with Croatians trying to move in on territory already divided among German, Albanian, and Turkish bosses as well as searching for a wealthy woman's lost dog and protecting an all too worldly 14-year-old Bosnian girl. While Kemal lacks charm, this entry will whet readers' appetite for the three earlier Kayankaya mysteries. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Established racketeering in Frankfurt—fairly peacefully divided among German, Albanian, and Turkish crime bosses—is upset when the mysterious Army of Reason suddenly starts asking business owners for exorbitant sums and lopping off their thumbs when demands aren't met. After restaurateur Romario becomes a victim, he turns to PI Kemal Kayankaya for help. His plan to scare off the Army of Reason, carried out with friend Silbulsky, turns into a shoot-out that leaves two extortionists dead, Kayankaya scratching to trace the new crime organization, more people killed and buildings blown up in retribution, and another country vying for a piece of the Frankfurt crime action. Winner of the German Thriller Prize and best sellers in Europe, Arjouni's four-book series featuring the wisecracking PI of Turkish descent who's not above using bribery and lies and calling on sources inside and outside the law to get what he needs is now being released in the United States for the first time. VERDICT Germany is a roiling melting pot in Arjouni's noir fiction with a light touch. A good bet for readers of the genre. [This title launches the publisher's new Melville International Crime imprint, previewed in Wilda Williams's "Passport to Mystery," LJ 4/15/10.—Ed.]—Michele Leber, Arlington, VA

Richard Lipez

&#8230lthis ethnic-Turk-in-Frankfurt moral scourge is as winning a noirish gumshoe as has swooped onto the mystery scene in some time. I can say "swooped" because Kayankaya is nimble in spite of being "old and fat."
—The Washington Post

Kirkus Reviews

A routine shakedown leads Frankfurt PI Kemal Kayankaya (One Death to Die, 1997, etc.) to a maze of slimy, violent crooks. The Saudade Restaurant doesn't do enough business for Romario, its owner, to pay a protection fee of 6,000 Deutschemarks per month. So after losing his thumb to a pair of tough guys who say they're from the Army of Reason, Romario gets Kayankaya and his buddy Slibulsky-the ice-cream man whose resume includes work as a bouncer and bodyguard-to protect him from the protectors. The result is a bloodbath that doesn't end until the Saudade is reduced to ashes. And it doesn't really end even then, because Kayankaya won't let the case die. Convinced that Dr. Michael Ahrens, the soup king whose BMW was obligingly parked outside the restaurant, is behind the racket, he digs in his heels. So does Ahrens, and there's a stalemate until Kayankaya, who's already got one client whose dog he's being paid to find, takes another, a teenaged refugee named Leila, who wants him to find her mother while Leila perfects her German by reading pornography. Despite the jocular mood, no story involving so many sordid felonies can end happily, and this one doesn't. The plot is full of holes and awkward shifts as Kayankaya hurtles from one nest of vipers to the next. But even apart from the obligatory anti-Turkish episode, the unsavory atmosphere is inimitable.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Jakob Arjouni's Kismet is another of this surprising writer's wonderfully odd crime novels. Amid murders and explosions, for example, it contains this timeless immigrant's refrain:

"…every year I have to go and beg to be allowed to stay another year. …I sit in that waiting room with all the other poor fools who've cleaned their shoes and put on clean shirts…. when your turn finally comes you're just a crumpled, stinking Thing and you'd almost agree with Herr Muller or Herr Meier if he looked at you as if to say, what's a pathetic creature like you doing in our lovely country?"

This could be 19^th-century Vienna. It is instead today's Germany, vividly and bleakly depicted in the latest novel in Arjouni's investigator Kayankaya series.

Arjouni, like Kemal Kayankaya, his not-so-hardboiled protagonist, is a German of Turkish origin. And like Kayankaya, he is also a mischievous subversive who delights in confounding easy assumptions -- xenophobic or liberal -- about his or any other immigrant's ethnicity. "…the Islamic scholar had picked me from the yellow pages on account of my name," Kayankaya observes of one German client, "and of course when we first met she had explained to me at length what the Turks were like, myself included. Industrious, proud…secret rulers of Asia -- in short, I was a whole great nation in myself."

Arjouni's tone throughout the Kayankaya series is breezily cynical and his plots straightforward, although usually spiked with a subtle twist. In Kismet, the novel in which Arjouni first introduces the detective, and which is newly available to American readers in this paperback edition from Melville House, Kayankaya is hired to scare off gangsters who are extorting protection money from a Brazilian restaurant owner in Frankfurt. When the plan goes bloodily wrong, Kayankaya finds himself confronting a sinister organization, "The Army of Reason," that emerged out of the Balkan wars and that threatens to disrupt Frankfurt's diverse organized crime scene. "You had the feeling that a kind of criminal Olympic Games was going on in the Frankfurt station district," Kayankaya observes of the city's competing international gangs. He must also find a Bosnian woman who has apparently been kidnapped by the criminal newcomers.

With its snappy dialogue and rumpled heroes, Arjouni's crime fiction owes an obvious debt to American noir but it is equally reminiscent of many Eastern European satirical novels. The plot of Kismet may recall any number of gangster romps, but the society so caustically depicted here is as recognizable as that conjured up, for instance, by Jaroslav Hasek in The Good Soldier Schweik. Entering a bar in the dreary town of Offenbach, for example, the laconic Kayankaya observes of the drinkers, "Most of them were around fifty and looked as if they had always been, as if they'd always been hanging around in bars and only went out now and then to get cheap suits and haircuts." Two killers who are stalking Kayankaya walk with "...those long, confident everybody-listen strides that Berliners have…"

The violence too, although occasionally cartoonish, is described with cinematic clarity but often shaded with rueful afterthoughts. "If two men die and everything's still the same as before, or worse, then something's wrong." Kayankaya reflects after the carnage of the novel's opening scene, "Or I could have put it to myself more simply: I wished I hadn't shot anyone." Neither he, nor his creator Arjouni, lets this hero off the hook.

--Anna Mundow