Kamil Pasha series by Jenny White

Jenny White is a writer and a social anthropologist. Jenny White now teaches social anthropology at Boston University as a tenured associate professor. She has published two scholarly books on contemporary Turkey.

Money Makes Us Relatives, a description of womenΓÇÖs 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. Jenny White lives in the Boston area.

Genre: Historical fiction | Mystery


#1 - The Sultan's Seal:
Rich in sensuous detail, this first novel brilliantly captures the political and social upheavals of the waning Ottoman Empire. The naked body of a young Englishwoman washes up in Istanbul wearing a pendant inscribed with the seal of the deposed sultan. The death resembles the murder by strangulation of another English governess, a crime that was never solved. Kamil Pasha, a magistrate in the new secular courts, sets out to find the killer, but his dispassionate belief in science and modernity is shaken by betrayal and widening danger. In a lush, mystical voice, a young Muslim woman, Jaanan, recounts her own relationships with one of the dead women and her suspected killer. Were these political murders involving the palace or crimes of personal passion? An absorbing tale that transports the reader to nineteenth-century Turkey, this novel is also a lyrical meditation on the contradictory desires of the human soul. Reading group guide included. Includes the first chapter of the next Kamil Pasha novel.

#2 - The Abyssinian Proof:
The Ottoman Empire is plagued by thefts of antiquities from mosques and churches that, within days, appear for sale in Europe. Among them is a reliquary, presumed lost for four hundred years and around which an elaborate and mysterious sect has grown. In Istanbul, magistrate Kamil Pasha is under pressure to break the smuggling ring amid rising tensions between Christians and Muslims. He confronts a mysterious adversary who will stop at nothing to get the reliquary first. With the Balkans aflame and KamilΓÇÖs personal life in upheaval, the search into the old neighborhoods where IstanbulΓÇÖs crime rings reside may cost Kamil not only his position but also his life. Jenny White enters this time of distrust and turmoil, re-creating the gritty underworld of a dying empire.

#3 - The Winter Thief:
December 1888. Vera Arti carries The Communist Manifesto in Armenian through IstanbulΓÇÖs 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 ArtiΓÇÖs 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 destroyedΓÇöalong 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.