Still in Books and Arts; Book Review;New thriller;Wreathed in smoke;

Makana is a poverty-stricken Sudanese political exile living alone on a rickety houseboat on the Nile. He is commissioned by Hanafi, a violent and corrupt Cairene oligarch, with finding Adil Romario, a star football player. Meanwhile, Liz Markham, the daughter of a British aristocrat, has been tortured and murdered while searching for her daughter, who went missing in Cairo more than 20 years earlier. A former policeman himself, Makana is no naif, but he rapidly finds himself in a perilous world peopled with Egypt's ultra-rich, Islamic militants and Russian organised crime. It's a heady mix, but one that Mr Bilal pulls off with verve.

A London-born literary novelist, Parker Bilal (whose real name is Jamal Mahjoub) has also lived in Cairo and Sudan. His prose has a subtlety that is rarely found in crime novels: an old man “screwed up his face so that all the lines drew together, like a net being drawn in”; metal rods on a construction site are scattered like “enormous burned matchsticks”; naked light bulbs on an electrical flex resemble “strange fruits on a vine”. The novel is set in pre-Arab-spring Cairo and the city is vividly evoked, its smells and sounds almost seeping from the pages. Characters such as Okasha, a policeman who is Makana's friend and ally, and Sami, a terrier-like reporter, are nuanced and believable though the story flags a little in the middle—always tricky territory for a crime novel—and there are perhaps one too many meaningful meetings with long looks across the table wreathed in cigarette smoke. In the end there is justice, of a sort. Some evildoers are punished, others walk free protected by higher authorities, just as they probably would in real-life Cairo. The twist at the end is subtly signalled. Makana, too, has his demons. His journey, as he learns to live with them, stays with you.