Jakob Arjouni's first novel, Happy Birthday, Turk!, was published when its author was just twenty. The book and its beleaguered hero, Turkish-German P.I., Kemal Kayankaya, instantly found an adoring audience around the world, and three more bestselling Kayankaya novels quickly followed.
More than twenty-five years after Arjouni’s debut—and after publishing a string of critically acclaimed literary novels—the author returns to his most beloved character. In Brother Kemal, we find that while things in Frankfurt have gotten glitzier, it's still the ugliest town in all of Germany, and the city's underworld has hardly changed at all.
Valerie de Chavannes, a financier's daughter, summons Kayankaya to her villa in Frankfurt's diplomat's quarter and commissions him to find her missing sixteen-year-old daughter. She is alleged to be with an older man who is posing as an artist. To Kayankaya, it seems like a simple case: an upper class girl with a taste for adventure.
Then another seemingly posh job turns up: a major publisher needs to protect a writer who has offended Islamist groups during the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The two cases seem to be straightforward, but it goes all-wrong for Kayankaya, as it almost always does. Luckily, that's when he's at his best.
Jakob Arjouni's first novel, Happy Birthday, Turk!, was published when its author was just twenty. The book and its beleaguered hero, Turkish-German P.I., Kemal Kayankaya,…
