Sunday, August 14, 2022

Blackwater Falls by Ausma Zehanat Khan

Blackwater Falls is a (fictional) well-to-do suburb of Denver. The main power brokers include a major Lockheed Martin facility, Apex Dynamics (a primary subcontractor to Lockheed Martin), The Resurrection Church (a non-denominational evangelical church and its Pastor, Gentleman Jack John Wayne), a National Foods plant (processes mostly meats), The Blackwater Academy (an exclusive private school), and Sheriff Addison Grant. And can’t forget about the Disciples (a motorcycle gang with ties to the Sheriff).

 

The community may indeed be quite affluent, but it also has taken in a considerable number of refugees primarily from the Middle East and Somalia. From this fringe population provides industry (especially National Foods) with a dispensable supply of workers for less than prestigious jobs.

 

The Sheriff is a no-nonsense type who is none too fond of the growing refugee population in his district. Two Somali teenage girls have gone missing with little investigative effort by the sheriff. A local attorney, Areesha Adams, keeps pushing for some action by law enforcement with little luck. 

 

Another teenage girl, the Syrian Razan Elkader, is found murdered and hung in effigy on the front door of the local mosque. The Denver PD puts the Community Response Unit in charge of the investigation shutting out the sheriff. This unit was set up to deal with potentially explosive crimes that might fuel the fires of the various minority factions in the Denver area. The Unit is made up of Waqas Seif (of Pakistani heritage), Inaya Rahman (Afghanistan native), Catalina Hernandez (Mexican), and Jaime Webb (newly minted detective and token American). 

 

Seizing the investigation from Sheriff Grant, the Unit starts working the profiles of the various factions who might’ve wanted this young girl killed. For example, her father was trying to unionize the National Foods workers. The church is openly hostile to non-whites. The sheriff is a white supremacist of the first order. The Disciples get their marching orders from the sheriff. Razan was an activist for local minorities, worked a part-time job at a local ice cream shop, academically gifted (winning a prestigious internship at Apex in the process), and the victim of school bullying by the star QB who’s headed to Ohio State on a scholarship. And the pot is continually stirred by Areesha Adams. Not to mention that it sure seems like the Unit boss, Seif, has his own agenda that seems to stall how the investigation progresses.

 

That’s a lot of juggling for any author - local politics, religion, bigotry, bullying, top secret research, betrayal, and more. This is my first book from Khan. Per her website, she “holds a Ph.D. in international human rights law with a research specialization in military intervention and war crimes in the Balkans. She completed her LL.B. and LL.M. at the University of Ottawa, and her B.A. in English literature & sociology at the University of Toronto.” Whew, that’s some pedigree. And she’s a multi-award winner author of 11 (fantasy, mystery, non-fiction) books. This is the first of what looks like a new series featuring Inaya Rahman.

 

A few years ago, I sprinted through a 3-book series about a Saudi female detective by Zoe Ferrais. While I still think the Ferrais books were absolutely top shelf, I’m thinking that this Rahman series will be worth a deep dive. I was concerned that the subject matter might’ve ended up being a bit too ‘woke’ for my tastes. By the time the investigation narrowed, that concern quickly disappeared. Give Khan a try. You might like it. 

 

Thanks to Netgalley for making an advance review copy available. The book is due to be published November 1, 2022.

 

ECD

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