The Janissary Tree

Istanbul, 1836: the Ottoman Empire is ten years past the Auspicious Incident, the day the sultan turned his artillery on his own Janissaries, the elite corps that had made and unmade emperors for centuries, and burned the survivors out of history. Now, with the sultan preparing to proclaim European style reforms, soldiers of the new model army are disappearing, one turning up dead in a cauldron, and a concubine is strangled in the palace harem. The court needs an investigator who can move everywhere, from the seraglio to the tanneries, and possesses no ambitions a throne need fear, and it has one: Yashim, a eunuch, multilingual, cultivated, unrankable, the empire's perfect confidential man.

Goodwin runs the two cases through an Istanbul rendered with a historian's inventory and a cook's palate, Yashim being the rare detective whose kitchen scenes, the market shopping, the careful pilafs, are set pieces readers cite alongside the chases. The soup makers' guild, the bathhouses, the transvestite dancers of the port, the Polish ambassador of a country that no longer exists, Yashim's melancholy chess partner in irrelevance, assemble into the investigation's map, and the trail runs where the title points: survivors of the massacred Janissaries, organised in the shadows around their old fire tower signals, planning a restoration timed to the reform decree. The palace case and the barracks case braid, treason wearing more than one uniform, and the solution costs Yashim exactly the kind of loyalty a man of no faction has nowhere to spend.

Around three hundred and thirty pages.

Best for readers who want the historical mystery with its history load bearing, an empire mid reinvention seen by the one investigator built to see all of it.