The Khan by Saima Mir
A successful lawyer, Jia Khan’s London life is a long way from the Northern streets she knew as a child, where her father, Akbar Khan, was head of the Pakistani community and ran the local organised crime syndicate. His Jirga rule – the old way – was violent and bloody, but it was also justice of a kind.
When her father is murdered, Jia must return to his community. In the past, the police relied on Akbar Khan to maintain the fragile order of the streets. But a bloody power struggle has broken out among the various communities and now, nobody is safe.
Justice needs to be restored, and Jia is about to discover that justice always comes at a price. Against a backdrop of racial divides, misogyny and prejudice, THE KHAN is a thrilling crime debut, set in a world rarely explored in fiction.
About the author.
SAIMA MIR is a British Pakistani journalist who grew up in Bradford. She has written for The Times, the Guardian and Independent. Her essay for It's Not About The Burqa (Picador) appeared in the Guardian and received over 250,000 hits online in two days. Saima has also contributed to the anthology The Best, Most Awful Job: Twenty Mothers Talk Honestly About Motherhood. Saima lives in London.
@SaimaMir #TheKhan @PointBlankCrime
Review.
Boy is this one fierce ride of a thriller! Its pace was relentless but there was a subtly of beauty behind the prose and it handed out karmic justice by the handful. This is an astounding book for a debut novel and it deals with a topic that isn't really written about in this genre. Asian organised crime is normally seen from the eyes of white writers, yes there is success of A. A. Dhand, Alex Caan and Liz Mistry but they look at the topic from the eyes of a police procedural. So for me this book was a first!
Jia Khan is a successful lawyer in London and is estranged from her family for over 15 years. However, her sister is getting married so she has to return to the family house and face her demons. Whilst there her father, Akbar, is murdered. Akbar headed the Jirga, the organised crime group that rules her home town. They expect her to step into his shoes but others think a woman should not be allowed to do this. Will she expect her familial pressures or return home to London, far away from the blood being spilt on the streets?
Jia is one hard faced bitch. There I said it. I don’t think I liked her at all, even at the start. But then I’m not sure you are meant to. Is she a product of her upbringing? Akbar raised her as a son rather than a daughter, issuing her with life’s lessons from an early age. Or has she managed to put that life behind her? Some of her decisions I understood but some were just brutal.
This book just screamed authenticity to me. Trust me all my knowledge comes from reading crime fiction but all the narrative just rang true. It had an air of quality and insider knowledge. Maybe it's just because the author hails from an Asian community and I don't but I was reading everything as gospel. Or maybe that is because of the standard of writing, that it swept me in its stream of prose. It was phenomenal. I had pre-ordered this book before I knew about this blog tour and I jumped at the chance to be on it. I'm so thankful I did as this book is unique, hard-hitting and thought-provoking.
