The Golden Scales
March 2013
Parker Bilal / Bloomsbury
A recent distinguished guest at the Perth and Adelaide Writers’ jamborees, Jamal Mahjoub, writing under the pen-name of Parker Bilal, introduces us to a brilliant new world of crime fiction. Tired of the factory line of gruesome Scandinavians or gun-toting Yanks? Enter Makana – a Sudanese police captain forced to flee his homeland during the rise of Islamic rule and now based on a scarcely viable houseboat on the Nile, he has set out his wares in Cairo. But trade is slow, he’s a quiet man with a troubled past, and he owes many months of rent. Why then would the city’s most prominent business leader, with police and politicians in his every pocket and at his beck and call, come to this shabby Sudanese with a request?
Billionaire developer Saad Hanafi not only owns large swathes of Cairo, but also its most famous football team. But now, Hanafi has lost one of his star football players from the so-called Dreem Team, and he is not happy. Makana is summoned from his shack on the Nile and asked to investigate the AWOL star. Things go from curious to labyrinthine, as Makana has a chance encounter with a British woman, a former heroin addict, also searching the shadowy yet sun-drenched, dusty back streets of Cairo for her abducted daughter. Here as Makana goes to work is Cairo in all its glory and terror, a city fabled, layered and intense, and now backdrop to one of the most original crime novel in years. Tremendous fun. Even better, it’s the start of a series of Makana novels, with Dogstar Rising also newly on the shelves.
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