Preamble
If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here. Or you can take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Review
I read this at the start of 2024 but am trying to catch up on some historic reviews. So, here we go!
This novel has an interesting premise: the tension between the cultures and habits of a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, poorly mediated by their son/husband. When the mother-in-law, Zina, is accused of the brutal murder of her daughter-in-law, another immigrant woman, Eva Georgiou, is called in to translate to help her navigate the legal system.
The novel hovers around possibly being a whydunnit or a howdunnit, but really is more interested in what justice means and how relationships form (or don’t) between generations of immigrants and those around them. We fairly quickly leave the crime behind, and particularly much detection work, to explore the alienation of the justice system from the inside.
Eva begins to form a bond with Zina, but the older woman is hard to reach, and when Zina admits that she has been previously accused of murder back home in Cyprus, Eva is torn. She struggles to do what she can for Zina, and to know where the limits of her empathy and responsibility should lie. Her life in (and integration into) London goes on, but ducking into Zina’s story and the prison where she’s held keeps Eva from really living.
Kyriacou, in a short article about the 1950s true crime that inspired the story, notes that these are the key elements of interest for her: how translators could influence criminal proceedings but were entirely ignored and unregulated, and how the sanity (or not) of a perpetrator could be both a crucial part of the story and utterly absent from the official version.
See also
These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
- Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
- Honour (Elif Shafak)
- Appropriate Adult (TV series)
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Dominique Gracia 
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