The "Dead Man in..." series, featuring Sandor Pelczynski Seymour as a somewhat unusual (a Brit with a flair for languages) East End policeman sent by Special Branch to trouble spots around the British Empire in the years leading up to WWI, is Michael Pearce's "other" series, besides his Mamur Zapt series. I love them both.
The second title in the series,
A Dead Man in Istanbul, has dropped to £0.99 at Amazon UK.
Amazon UK:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01INI2JKE
Amazon UK/Smile:
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01INI2JKE
Spoiler:
Quote:
From the author of the award-winning Mamur Zapt books, the second in a series introducing Seymour of Special Branch and set in the British embassies and Consulates of Europe in the early 1900s.
The Second Secretary of the Embassy in Istanbul has died in decidedly strange circumstances while attempting to swim the Dardanelles Straits, the passage between Europe and Asia, heavily used by warships, liners, tankers and cargo vessels of all kinds. A romantic attempt to repeat the legendary feat of Leander, as the Embassy says? Or an attempt to spy out a possible landing place for a British military expedition, as the Turks insist? Whichever, Cunningham has ended up with a bullet in his head.
The suspicious circumstances of his death have to be investigated so the Foreign Office sends out an officer of the Special Branch: Seymour.
As Seymour tries to untangle the threads that lead to Cunningham's death, their ends lead him into all parts of the city, from the little box shops of the Avenue of Slippers to Les Petits Champs des Morts, where fashionable Turkish ladies loiter among the tombs to eat sweets; from the crowded coffee houses around the Galata Bridge where men sit all day smoking bubble pipes to the heart of the Topkapi Palace itself.
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