"Complicated Favors: A Turkish Affair" -- A Cracking-Good Read
First-Time Travel Adventure-Writer Delivers
First-time author Jeanne Reeder's heroine is a forensic psychologist (and part time CIA operative) named Charly. As her name suggests, Charly is a thoroughly modern Western woman -- equipped mentally and physically to meet whatever life offers up, and then some. Raised in Alaska by a frontiersman-like father who taught survival as a matter of course, Charly learned to run, jump and shoot like a green beret at an early age. And it's a good thing too, because climactic events of this novel demand every bit of her rough-and-ready background.
As the novel opens, Charly (now an attractive, full-blooded widow-of-a-certain-age) and her elderly female companion, Frances, are revisiting Turkey to relive old times, enjoy new ones -- and incidentally, as at first seems, to deliver a package. Delivery of that package (with its secretly encoded map-coordinates between tracks of an ethnic-Kurdish music CD) ultimately involves Charly in intrigue and terrorism (and romance) -- in a hell-bent-for-leather story that starts fast and never lets up.
Insofar as intrigue and terrorism are concerned, Ms. Reeder's story rings true -- seeming to jump off the pages of this week's mainstream Turkish newspapers. For, at this level, Complicated Favors (CF) is a tale of Turkey's continuing struggle against PKK terrorists -- which leads our heroine inevitably and relentlessly from balmy autumn venues in Western Turkey to the snowy wilds of the Sat-Clio Mountains on Iran's border in the Turkish far east.
Out there in the hinterlands, Charly's physical and mental skills are tested to their limits -- and she is even called upon, as an equal member of a multi-cultural anti-terrorist combat team, to kill PKK terrorists. But while the author never leaves the reader in doubt about the PKK's vicious terrorist reality, she also lends a sympathetic ear to the tribulations of ordinary Kurdish-Turks -- and to their understandable desire to celebrate their heritage.
CF is not all 'blood and guts' action, though. Ms. Reeder's deft inclusion of Turkey's naturally lusty Romantic Ambiance (as a third, intangible main character) is also notable. That inclusion makes CF a thoroughly sexy (though never prurient) novel too -- as it follows the developing romance between Charly and Hakan, her Turkish counterpart and mission-buddy. And, when American flesh meets Turkish flesh, well, let's just say that...
Click following to access the complete and fully illustrated HTML review of Complicated Favors:
A Turkish Affair.
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