The Language of Secrets: A Novel (Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak Novels) Kindle Edition BY Ausma Zehanat Khan

 

Hi everyone.

I’m Maria and this is promotekdbook.com

Today I’m going to be doing a book review on The Language of Secrets by Ausma Zehanat Khan.

 

I read the first book in the series, which was The Unquiet Dead last and I absolutely loved it.

I will link to my review in case you guys are interested in that.

And this is the second book in that mystery series.

 

In these stories you are following Detective Esa Khattak who is a Muslim man working for Canada’s police’s force, I keep wanting to say Canadia, I am such an American.

He works for this specific section of the police force that handles minority sensitive topics.

And specifically he works on a lot of Muslim-related cases for obvious reasons.

In this story, Detective Khattak is called into this special unit, uh, because they find out that there is this potential terrorist attack that is going to be happening on New Years Eve or New Years Day.

And the special units had an informant who was embedded in the community, uh, Mohsin Dar who was killed.

 

And so Esa Khattak is called in partially because he was an acquaintance with Mohsin Dar and so his job is to basically make it look like they are investigating the death of Mohsin Dar so that way people aren’t, you know, snooping around to figure out what’s going on because they don’t want their plan or their investigation to get blown.

 

But then Detective Khattak ends up sending in his partner Rachel Getty sort of undercover in the mosque that he was attending around the people that they were investigating, um, to sort of figure out what really did happen with the murder instead of just like letting it go.

 

So when I read The Unquiet Dead last year, I completely fell into the story, fell in love with these detectives and really loved what Ausma Zehanat Khan was doing because she’s taking these characters and these sort of complex topics and exploring them and fleshing them out and showing the more gray areas when it comes to this stuff.

 

I gave The Unquiet Dead 4 stars out of 5 and I gave this one 3 and a half stars out of 5.

 

And I think the reason why I love The Unquiet Dead more than I liked The Language of Secrets is because I felt like The Unquiet Dead dealt with things that weren’t normally talked about, which was the Serbian/Croatian massacre that happened in the 90s.

 

And with The Language of Secrets, you’re dealing with something that is a terrorist plot, which I feel like is something that is often used in mysteries now a days.

And even though Ausma Zehanat Khan is able to provide a new and interesting angle to it, I felt like I wasn’t quite as invested in this story just because I feel like, again, terrorist plots are something that is often talked about.

 

That being said, I still really enjoyed this.

Honestly, Detective Khattak is probably one of my favorite detectives in mystery series period.

I think it’s because he is so unique, he’s a Muslim man so he provides a very different point of view compared to other people.

 

There is a little bit of a trope with him where, you know, he’s a very handsome man who was in love with his wife and then his wife died and he still only loves her but every other woman seems to be attracted to him sort of thing happening in this story, which every time that happens I’m just like, ugh.

 

All right, we get it.

But other than that, I really do enjoy him and I enjoy his partnership with Rachel Getty.

If you’ve watched my reviews of the Robert Gailbraith books, you know that one of my least favorite things is the fact that they keep hinting at some sort of like chemistry between those two characters.

And in this one, they haven’t done that, at least not yet.

 

Ausma Zehanat Khan is very much taking her time with developing their friendship.

 

Not that they don’t trust each other yet, but you can see their sort of friendship getting stronger and growing and their partnership growing with each book, which is very nice and I enjoy that a lot.

I think that was also one of the downsides of this book for me a little bit, was the fact that they spend so much time apart because Rachel Getty was undercover in the mosque, they didn’t touch base as much as they did in the first book.

And so I feel like the book was stronger in the scenes when they were together and working together and sort of brainstorming as opposed to when they’re on their own and each working their own side.

But I will say that the last like quarter of this book still really blew me away.

I didn’t quite see the twist coming, or at least you know, how everything wraps up, I didn’t see that coming at all.

 

And I’m very interested to see how some of the things that were discussed in here sort of become things that you build upon in future books.

And I’m definitely going to keep picking up the books in this series because, again, this is just such a unique series because it’s taking a point of view that I don’t think is seen very much in mystery books at least not in any of the mystery books that I’ve read.

 

And especially because Ausma Zehanat Khan is a Muslim woman herself and worked in international human rights law, she has a lot of experience and knowledge and a good point of view in this world.

So she’s able to draw upon all that to write these really incredible complex characters.

 

So yeah, I still recommend this series very highly.

 

Um.

If you haven’t read the first book in the series, you don’t necessarily need to before reading this one, but I always think that it’s better to just start at the beginning and go on through.

But I still very, very much highly recommend this if you are someone who likes mystery novels, then this is definitely a series to put on your radar.

 

So yeah, those are my quick thoughts on The Language of Secrets.

If you’ve read this book or you’ve read The Unquiet Dead, feel free to leave a comment down below.

I still think this book is very, very underrated and I wish more people would pick it up.

So hopefully I can convince you guys.

So yeah, that’s all I have for now and thanks for reading.
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