Without naming names, Buse tells the owner of the transvestite night club where she hangs out that she still has letters and photos from a youthful liaison with an important public figure who very much wants the evidence to disappear. The next day, Buse is murdered but the police are uninterested, so the only way to find the murderer is to find the letters and photos.

A fascinating narrator and some very funny scenes in this thriller set in an interesting milieu. Unfortunately the font in this ebook was unable to cope with Turkish diacritics, which was distracting at times. ( )

Abandoned about half way through.

The cover is fantastic.

This was a slog and I sometimes had to wonder if I was really reading a mystery novel. Once I got halfway through, saw that it was supposed to be hilarious. I hadn't seen anything that looked like a joke....

And it didn't really feel like she was investigating anything really. There didn't seem to be all that much stakes and I couldn't work out why someone who was being paid to be a white hat hacker wasn't using those skills to investigate this stuff.

Cover's fantastic though. ( )

Stylish, charismatic, could be described as vapid. Entertaining and refreshingly free of an airtight plot. ( )

A Turkish drag queen hunts for a killer among those at her club.

Our heroine is a computer guy by day, drag queen at night. When performer Buse is found dead, and it looks like blackmail, our hero is on the case. Fully dressed, most often like Audrey Hepburn.

The story relies heavily on this unnamed protagonist's efforts to be gorgeous at all times, and almost all of her thoughts focus on herself. She shows a little sympathy for the dead but damn. It gets tiresome.

I think too much of an effort was made to highlight the drag queen humor and too little in the development of a plot. Good effort, interesting setting, but I just didn't like her. Among other things, she struggled with whether to call Buse by her chosen name or by her birth name, usually referring to her as Buse/Fevzi. Just call her what she wanted to be called. Is it that hard? ( )

I do wish I could do .5 with Goodreads. I'm a very grey girl in my thinking. And this is definitely more than a 2. . . I read this book as part of my investigation of world mystery writing. Set off by Wallender and the Girl with the Dragon Tatoo. Interested in world detectives (after all I think it's arguable that Dickens and Wilkie Collins were there at the birth of the detectie). And here we have a Turkish (Instanbul) detective who is computer wiz by day, cross-dresser diva running a club at night. Who wouldn't read at least one.

It's always difficult with translations to know what of the clunkiness in the writing was there at the beginning and how much is the translation. There was something very clunky about the prose and plotting of this novel. But the entry into a world I would never have imagined in contemporary Turkey was intriguing. And this is only one book in a fairly extensive series. ( )