THE UNQUIET DEAD by Ausma Zehanat Khan No Exit Press, £7.99
Detective Rachel Getty and her boss Esa Khattak normally handle minority-sensitive cases so Getty is surprised when Khattak takes on the case.
Then it comes to light that Drayton may have been a war criminal linked to the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995.
That would provide a motive for murder for plenty of people among Canada’s community of Bosnian refugees.
As they dig deeper into the life of Drayton, Getty and Khattak uncover other troubling secrets and must work out whether the horrors of war or more recent crimes have led to his death.
British-born Zehanat Khan lives in America and holds a PhD in international human rights law. An expert on the Srebrenica massacre she opens each chapter with statements from war crimes hearings at The Hague and interweaves stories of the ethnic cleansing and mass rapes that took place in Bosnia in the early 1990s into the novel.
If her characters are a little one-dimensional and her lengthier passages challenging to read, Zehanat Khan is to be applauded for tackling such an important subject in a police procedural.