The Janissary File

In late 1982 a woman was found murdered in a ditch near a village in Lower Egypt. She was not the usual victim of some family feud or a crime of honour, but a well-known personality, and the subject of parliamentary debates and vitriolic attacks in the media. A formidable, if slightly arrogant, Turkish lawyer, she had been pursuing a ruthless campaign to acquire vast stretches of agricultural and urban land that had been turned into Islamic trusts centuries earlier by the Ottoman ruling class and were later dissolved by President Nasser. Thousands of Egyptians with genuine or alleged Turkish ancestors were lured into a scheme to get rich by cannibalising the age-old family trusts. Yet there were others with different motives-they wanted to get rid of a troublesome foreigner who in their view was abusing the law and had become a danger to society. The fictitious plot unfolds against the real social and legal background of Egypt in the 1980s with the property campaign at its peak. This is a historical novel that will appeal to those who love a good detective story as well as to anyone interested in the Middle East, its history and its present.