The pashazade soon finds that his life depends on his wits, an aptitude for combat and the unravelling of a mystery where the bodies begin to mount up. And the reader gradually learns of the twisted, troubled trail that brings Raf to mid-21st century Isk from the America that brokered a settlement in 1916 between London and Berlin, victorious in the Great World War. Five years after Woodrow Wilson cut the deal, the Prussian empire collapsed, leaving chunks of Europe and the Near East in the hands of the Austro-Hungarians and the Sublime Porte in Stambul.
Isk is more than ever a marketplace of cultures, a free port whose relative independence and religious tolerance under Egypt's Khedive and his powerful German advisor, General Saeed Koenig Pasha, is sustained because of its importance to the world's trade in commodities and information.

Trouble starts with a corpse and a meticulous, hot but ruinously alcoholic onetime Los Angeles cop, Felix Abrinsky, the city's Chief of Detectives. There are faint echoes of Raymond Chandler in the tale, along with classic 'Casablanca (iMDB)' and, of course, Lawrence Durrell, who made the city such a living, heaving part of his 'Alexandria Quartet'.
Some of the critics who showered Grimwood with glory when 'Pashazade' came out in 2001, the first part of an Ashraf Bey trilogy, made much of perceived parallels with Durrell's work.
This writer, however, has become very much his own man. His French and his Brits have second-bit parts, mainly as tourists.
"File under Science Fiction" the publisher orders on the back of the book, but what on earth for? 'Pashazade' sits just as well on quality crime thriller shelves and is also a strong contribution to mainstream modern literature. The style is sometimes leisurely with evocative detail, sometimes as swift as the bloodshed and betrayal that stain the city's concealed foundations and ZeeZee's life.

Ashraf Bey gets little time to dig into his own origins and mature to handle some almost unprecedented emotions — such as love — if he and anybody he learns to care about are to survive. Acts of brutality are unsparingly recounted by an author who last month told SF Crowsnest that "I hate sanitised violence. It's morally and intellectually dishonest to have somebody stand back up after getting coshed or shot. Violence hurts, it breaks things and it wrecks families and destroys communities."
That's a good interview and Grimwood's an interesting man, with a slick "official site", as deftly constructed as his prose.