How crime is paying
CRIME is proving very profitable – for Asian women. A good example is Saima Mir, author of The Khan. At a tube station I noticed her novel is the Waterstones thriller “Book of the Month”.
In fact, I have read the novel which was published last year. A woman, Jia Khan, gives up her career as a lawyer to take over the family business in crime. It's not a book for the squeamish. It's worth quoting the review in The Times which shows Asian women are no longer restricting their plots to arranged marriage.
It says: “London lawyer Jia Khan – ‘her eyes were like rum-soaked almonds, her skin golden and soft' – has come a long way from the northern streets ruled by the Jirga, a criminal organisation headed by her devout Muslim father. ‘No one knew exactly how many police officers had tried and failed to bring them to justice, how many lives they had taken to achieve their ends.'
Jia's brilliance in court is down to her ensuring she is always ‘twice as good as men and four times as good as white men.' Such tactics prove invaluable when, through force of circumstance, she succeeds her father as leader of the Jirga and strives to protect the drugs and prostitution network from greedy east European gangsters.
“Like all good novels The Khan raises more questions than it answers. It is, of course, about crime and justice, race and prejudice, but it is also about self-deception, disillusion and how the people you love most can become the people you can bear least. To begin with, its progress is stately – preferring to tell rather than show – but Bradford-born Khan soon gets into her stride and provides scene after scene of intense drama. The information she imparts is often eye-popping too: who knew the reason that fireworks go off so often nowadays is to signal the arrival of another drug shipment?
This impressive debut reveals a world in which monsters exist ‘in the guise of friends and behind smiling faces'. It is a considerable achievement.”
I noticed that AA Dhand, himself a master of the genre, has called the book “a once in a generation crime thriller”.