A rich and palatable mixture

At the heart of this novel is the notion that a sexual predator can find natural cover for his activities in a war zone. Its title is taken from a Turkish phrase meaning a woman who unwittingly arouses a man’s sexual interest. The narrator, Connie Burns, is a foreign correspondent, born in Zimbabwe, educated at Oxford and at home in the troubled places of the world. In Sierra Leone, she reports on the rape and murder of several local women, and her suspicions are aroused by the presence in Freetown of John Harwood, a former British soldier and mercenary, whom she knew under another name in Kinshasa. Two years later, in 2004, he pops up under a third name in occupied Baghdad as a ‘security consultant’, and there are murders with a similar modus operandi.

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