Sometimes you just have to take an author's word for something. Whether it's a subject you know nothing about or a setting you're completely unfamiliar with, you put yourself at the mercy of the mind behind the pen and hope he or she is being as accurate as fiction allows.

It becomes especially tricky when you start dealing with a culture that you have no real personal knowledge of, but that everybody in the world seems to have an opinion on. You can't open a paper, a journal, or go online these days without someone, somewhere providing an analysis of the Muslim mind whether they are qualified to or not.

It's hard not to develop a certain amount of prejudice under those circumstances, or at least to develop a picture that is coloured by news reports of suicide bombings and terrorist attacks. How then does one approach novels written about life set in the world that is known to us only through the eyes of reporters and politicians?

What type of glasses will we need to don that will allow us gaze past the web of our preconceived ideas? No matter what our personal sympathies maybe they aren't based on living the life the author has experienced, or the circumstances that characters in his or her book will endure.

Nothing we believe to be true will most likely have any bearing on reality, so the best that we can hope from ourselves is that we are brave enough to surrender to our guide, and to trust that our critical faculties that allow us to hear false notes can cross cultural borders. In other words try not to think of the Pink Elephant that is the cultural difference and read the book for what it is, not what it isn't.

In the case of expatriate Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra's police detective novel Morituri that is both easily accomplished and almost impossible at the same time. First of all Yasmina Khadra is a the pen name for an ex-high ranking officer in the Algerian army named Mohammed Moulessehoul who was forced to assume an alias to prevent censorship while living in Algeria.

The fact that in Morituri his chief character is Superintendent Llob of the Algiers' police force is also an author involved in the fight against terrorism does give one pause for thought at Khadra's bias. But that is soon forgotten amidst the depths of the story, and the way in which he is able to entangle you so quickly into Llob's life.