Baksheesh

In Aykol’s impressive second Kati Hirschel mystery set in Istanbul (after 2011’s Hotel Bosphorus), Kati, a German expatriate “who loves reading detective stories and has a shop specializing in crime fiction that provides her with enough to live on,” faces an unaffordable rent increase. Rather than moving in with her respectable lover, Kati decides to bribe government officials to obtain a new place. Along the way, she argues with car-park man Osman Karakas, a man with a reputation for burning down buildings so parking lots can be built on the sites, who’s later found dead with a bullet wound in the leg that shouldn’t have been fatal. Now a suspect in the Osman murder, Kati (who notes that in “films, people get shot in the leg as a threat. Then they appear in the next scene hobbling around with a wounded leg”) once again turns amateur sleuth with aplomb. (Mar.)