A Dangerous Crossing

Starred review from December 18, 2017
Contemporary political events drive Khan’s excellent fourth novel featuring Insp. Esa Khattak and Sgt. Rachel Getty (after 2017’s Among the Ruins). The Canadian prime minister asks the pair to help Nate Clare, an ally of his and an old friend of Esa’s, find his missing sister, Audrey. Audrey, who works for an NGO that facilitates the Canadian government’s efforts to resettle Syrian refugees, has gone missing in Greece. She vanished from the island of Lesvos on the same day that the bodies of a French Interpol agent and a Syrian whose case she was supervising were found at the NGO’s offices there. The PM is worried that his government could topple if the resettlement program doesn’t go smoothly. While the Greek authorities view Audrey as a person of interest in the murders, Esa and Rachel support Nate’s belief that she was abducted. Their search for her takes them to Greece and beyond. Khan demonstrates a superior ability to inject moving portrayals of the individual faces of an ongoing humanitarian crisis into a suspenseful story line. Agent: Danielle Burby, Hannigan Salky Getzler.

Starred review from February 1, 2018
When Canadian refugee-relief activist Audrey Clare disappears from a camp in Greece, her influential brother, Nathan, reels in favors to ensure that the Canadian investigation is led by their close friends, detectives Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty. It's a messy case: the bodies of a Syrian boy and a French Interpol detective were found in Audrey's tent, and the Greek police have branded Audrey as a fugitive. Finding Audrey requires navigating a tangle of viable leads with little help from the camp's traumatized inhabitants or from the Greek police. There is no shortage of threats to investigate: Greek nationalist groups are targeting the camp with increasing violence; the area is teeming with predatory traffickers and organized-crime syndicates; and Audrey's recent secretive trips to Brussels and Turkey add further questions. Ali, Audrey's translator, may hold the missing pieces to the puzzle, but he doesn't know whom to trust. Esa and Rachel's personal connections to the Clares lends this entry emotional weight, especially as romantic subplots push the tight-knit circle into unresolved territory. This fourth in the series is a complex global thriller lifted to bar-raising heights by Khan's (Among the Ruins, 2017) thoughtful (and timely) exploration of the tragedies and dangers that refugees face.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)