An Evil Eye by Jason Goodwin

Well, I made it through the fourth, and current, book in the Investigator Yashim series, “An Evil Eye.” I hope that Jason Goodwin, the author, takes a break for a few years. Four books in four years is an amazing achievement for a novice fiction writer. The money must be a welcome change to an otherwise obscure historian specializing in the 19th century Ottoman Empire.

My reticence for further accolades might be due to my distractions as July 4th approached and I had am open house exhibit going on at the local Community Center; but it also may be due to Jason’s rush to glory while his publisher was still pushing advance checks into his face. This book shows the signs of a distracted author that weren’t there in the first three. Goodwin has been guilty of meandering in all the preceding books but with the first three, as far as we can tell, he caught himself and tied the errant thread back into the plotline. In this book, he goes off in direction and doesn’t clean things up until the very end.
Having said the above, I still heartily recommend the series. Any flaws with this last one are more than compensated for by the continued lyrical presentation of Constantinople in 1839, life in Istanbul, life in the sultan’s palace, and of course, love, life, and mystery two centuries ago.

There is no simple plotline in this fourth book in the series. Goodwin has fallen prey to a common problem of a rush to publication. Each of the first three books had clear, simple mainline plot threads: the Janissary Tree was a revolt of the old guard; the Snake Stone revolved around relics and commerce in antiquities; the Bellini Card focused on family traditions in Venice.

This plot investigates women’s lives and travails in the seraglio. Goodwin creates subplots around a young girl, another around potential mates for the sultan; then another for head woman, the sultan’s grandmother. He also follows the head woman’s rival along with the intrigues in the palace. He channels his youth growing up in the palace through an adventuresome young man. While on intrigue, he also weaves subplots around the numbers 2, 3, and 4 political officials, viziers and pashas. There are half a dozen other subplot lines and a great number of new characters introduced. There were too many for me to keep track of and I missed his elaborate attention to detail in two areas: when describing the city; and preparing a meal. These last two areas were there in the book, but not with the pizzazz of previous books.
I’m serious when I suggest that someone needs to pull together all his recipes and discussions of food and eating. Everything is available here in northern California and it just fits in well with the semi-vegetarian California cuisine.