I Read Books: Pashazade

Pashazade

Zac is plucked out of prison in Seattle and taken to El Iskandryia in alternate future Ottoman North Africa, where he discovers he is Ashraf al-Mansur, aka Ashraf Bey, a nobleman with an aunt, a young cousin and an arranged marriage. In short order his aunt is killed and the arranged marriage is unarranged, someone has faked Ashraf Bey’s past and also is trying to frame him for more than one murder.

But this makes this not-quite cyberpunk noir mystery seem more coherent than it is. No one knows what’s going on and Ashraf’s history is unspooled in a disjointed manner, revealing his genetic coding and the hallucinatory fox that may be a computer program in his head. He doesn’t know about Alexandria and has to navigate his way, equal parts helped by his noble status and held back by his ignorance.

Read This: For an almost dream-like mystery, evoking the strangeness of the settings through the scattershot structure
Don’t Read This: If concealing the plot through revealing the story almost in random order and occasional horrific violence is not for you