Murder in Constantinople
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
A gripping, immersive historical murder mystery in which a wayward boy from London's East End is pulled into the hunt for a serial killer on the eve of the Crimean War
London, 1854. Twenty-one-year-old Ben Canaan attracts trouble wherever he goes. His father wants him to be a good Jewish son, working for the family business on Whitechapel Road, but Ben and his friends, the 'Good-for-Nothings', just want adventure.
Then the discovery of an enigmatic letter and a photograph of a beautiful woman offer an escapade more dangerous than anything he'd imagined. Suddenly Ben is thrown into a mystery that takes him all the way to Constantinople, the jewel of an empire and the centre of a world on the brink of war.
His only clue is three words: 'The White Death'. Now he must find what links a string of grisly murders, following a trail through kingmaking and conspiracy, poison and high politics, bloodshed and betrayal. In a city of deadly secrets, no one is safe - and one wrong step could cost Ben his life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Screenwriter Goldin debuts with an overstuffed historical adventure set in London and Constantinople on the eve of the Crimean War. Ben Canaan is a disgruntled 21-year-old whose dreams of attending university were dashed when he was forced to work in his Jewish family's tailor shop on Whitechapel Road. His disdain for the arrangement has led him to team up with two equally restless friends to form a group of adventure-seekers called the Good-for-Nothings. Ben stumbles into the sort of excitement the group is after when he finds a daguerreotype of a young woman he was in love with years ago inside a suit at his family's shop, along with a mysterious letter that reads "The White Death – more to come – trust no one." The return address on the letter is in Constantinople, so Ben sets off for the city, where his search for his lost love entangles him in multiple murder investigations, a political assassination attempt, and a plot to distribute a mysterious, deadly poison. Goldin writes with a certain swashbuckling charm, but anachronisms abound, and the proliferation of subplots gets in the way of character development. Despite a promising start, this exhausts more than it entertains.
