SOURCE: Parrinder, Patrick. “Mannequin-Maker.” London Review of Books 17, no. 19 (5 October 1995): 22.

In the following review, Parrinder comments that The Black Book combines elements of the “postmodern detective novel” with aspects of the “dysfunctional family saga.”

A winter evening in Istanbul in the late Seventies. Political murders, disappearances and torture are daily events, and a military coup seems to be in the offing. Galip, a young lawyer whose speciality is defending political prisoners, returns home to find that his wife Rüya has left him. His instinctive response is to pretend that nothing has happened—Rüya is simply too ill to leave the apartment or come to the telephone. He then begins to scour the city looking for her.

Galip's wife is also his cousin, and he soon discovers that her half-brother, the much-admired Jelal, has also gone into hiding. In a city of readers addicted to crime novels...