Barbara Nadel's Turkish Detective, Çetin İkmen

 

The bestselling Cetin Ikmen crime novels by Barbara Nadel, set in modern-day Istanbul, are coming to the small screen, thanks to a new pact between 

Miramax and ViacomCBS Int’l Studios (VIS) to co-produce the series adaptation, “The Turkish Detective.” 

Production of “The Turkish Detective” is slated for Spring 2021 in Istanbul.

Mavi Boncuk |

Barbara Nadel is an English crime-writer. Many of her books are set in Turkey, others in London's East End.

Nadel has written 21 books in her series about Çetin İkmen, a chain-smoking and hard-drinking detective on the Istanbul police force, and his colleagues Mehmet Süleyman, Balthazar Cohen, and Armenian pathologist Arto Sarkissian. These have been translated into a number of languages, including Turkish, and have been released as audiobooks in English and German.

Her second crime series, set in West Ham in the East End of London, during The Blitz, features undertaker Francis Hancock.

Çetin İkmen

1. Belshazzar's Daughter (1999)[1]
2. A Chemical Prison (aka The Ottoman Cage) (2000)
3. Arabesk (2001)
4. Deep Waters (2002)
5. Harem (2003)
6. Petrified (2004)
7. Deadly Web (2005)
8. Dance With Death (2006)
9. A Passion for Killing (2007)
10. Pretty Dead Things (2007)
11. River of the Dead (2009)
12. Death by Design (2010)
13. A Noble Killing (2011)
14. Dead of Night (2012)[2]
15. Deadline (2013)
16. Body Count (2014)^[
17. Land of the Blind (2015)
18. On the Bone (2016)
19. The House of Four (2017)
20. Incorruptible (2018)
21. A Knife to the Heart (2019)
22. Blood Business (2020)[3]

[1] Leonid Meyer, an elderly Jewish Russian refugee, had been tortured and murdered in his home in the Balat area of Istanbul. A swastika, drawn using Meyer’s blood, was left on the wall above his body. Officials are concerned that the murder is evidence of rampant racism in Istanbul, but Inspector Cetin Ikmen is not so sure. As he and his sergeant, Suleyman, investigate, they uncover a complex history of Russian immigrants, German Nazis, and secrets worthy of murder.

Belshazzar’s Daughter is the first book in Nadel’s Inspector Ikmen mystery series. This is an interesting series, detailing life in Istanbul. The plot in this book is complex, and the writing is fine (other than a handful of times when the addition of commas would have been helpful). In addition, Nadel’s characters are interesting and richly developed.

[2] Inspectors Cetin Ikmen and Mehmet Suleyman from Istanbul are sent to a policing conference in Detroit, but little can prepare them for the corruption that lies at its heart. When Ezekial Goins, an elderly man of Turkish descent approaches them to crack the long-unsolved murder of his son, a quiet trip takes a far more sinister turn. As they delve deeper into the case, the pair find themselves immersed in a terrifying world of inter-gang drug war and racial prejudice that puts them in mortal danger, and forces Ikmen to confront some demons of his own...

[3] Brothers Ugur and Lokman Bulut are locked in a bitter inheritance battle and need a sample of their mother's DNA to contest her Will. But whe

n her body is exhumed, her corpse is found to be missing and a fresh body, with its heart removed, has been put in her grave. Assigned to the case, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman quickly realises that the heart has been illegally harvested, and his team has a murder inquiry on its hands.

Meanwhile, retired inspector Çetin Ikmen is tracking down a missing person: Sevval Kalkan, a once-famous actress, who has joined an underground movement called the Moral Maze, whose mission is to help the destitute living on Istanbul's streets. The unidentified body in the grave cannot be Sevval's, but her shocking reappearance leads Ikmen to fear that she, too, is a victim of organ harvesting...

Joining forces, Süleyman and Ikmen confront Istanbul's darkest underbelly to expose the horrifying truth of a city in crisis.