Pretty Dead Things

Barbara Nadel's gripping Ikmen mysteries are the inspiration behind The Turkish Detective, BBC Two's sensational eight-part TV crime drama series, out now.


When peace and love turn into deadly conflict...

Inspector Ikmen and Inspector Sulleymen uncover the dark legacies of Istanbul's past in Pretty Dead Things, the tenth chilling thriller from the Inspector Ikmen series. Barbara Nadel will impress fans of Andrea Camilleri and Jason Goodwin.

'Riveting... Nadel takes us far beneath the surface of the city's ancient streets... A heady and stunningly exciting take on the crime genre' - Lancashire Evening Post

When Emine Aksu, the flamboyant wife of an Istanbul style guru, suddenly goes missing, Inspector Cetin Ikmen's investigation leads him deep into her strange and colourful past.

Emine was a hippie when she was younger, who wholeheartedly enjoyed the liberated lifestyle that swept across the city when the western Europeans flooded into Istanbul in the sixties. According to her husband, Emine never really left behind the free love pleasures she discovered back then and he suspects she was visiting an old friend at the time of her disappearance. Meanwhile, Inspector Mehmet Suleyman is called to a terrifying scene at the art deco Kamondo Stairs in the old banking district of Karakoy. The skeleton of a woman has been discovered in one of the large plant containers. Could these two bizarre incidents be linked?

What readers are saying about Pretty Dead Things:

'A well planned novel with a mixture of the politics and social history of Istanbul as a background to a thrilling mystery starring Inspector Ikmen'

'The plot is one of her [Barbara Nadel's] best and her characters [...] have become fully fleshed individuals by this point in the series'