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Parker Bilal

Golden Scales: A Makana Investigation Hardcover – 6 February 2012

by Parker Bilal (Author)

87 ratings

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The ancient city of Cairo is a feverish tangle of the old and the new, of the superrich and the desperately poor, with inequality and corruption everywhere. It's a place where grudges and long-buried secrets can fester, and where people can disappear in the blink of an eye.

Makana, a former Sudanese police inspector forced to flee to Cairo, is now struggling to make ends meet as a private detective. In need of money, he takes a case from the notoriously corrupt mogul Saad Hanafi, owner of a Cairo soccer team, whose star player, Adil Romario, has gone missing. Soon, Makana is caught up in a mystery that takes him into the treacherous underbelly of his adopted city, encountering Muslim extremists, Russian gangsters, vengeful women, and a desperate mother hunting for her missing daughter-a trail that leads him back into his own story, stirring up painful personal memories and bringing him face-to-face with an old enemy from his past ...

Published on the anniversary of the revolution in Egypt, The Golden Scales is an elegantly written, thrilling story set in a city of upheaval, chaos, and corruption.

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Product details

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (6 February 2012)
Language : English
Hardcover : 397 pages
ISBN-10 : 1608197948
ISBN-13 : 978-1608197941
Dimensions : 15.14 x 3.72 x 21.74 cm

Customer Reviews:
87 ratings

Product description

About the Author

Parker Bilal is the pseudonym of Jamal Mahjoub. The Burning Gates is his fourth Makana Investigation. Born in London, Mahjoub has passed through Sudan, Egypt, Denmark and Britain, before settling in Barcelona.

Customer reviews

5 star		43%
4 star		35%
3 star		10%
2 star		8%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from Australia

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Recommended.

Reviewed in Australia on 1 May 2016

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A well written detective story by an author who knows his craft well and has given us as also a picture of events in Egypt in recent years. Recommended.

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Wayne

Couldn't put it down.

Reviewed in Australia on 19 May 2014

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Great story line, with unpredictable twists and turns; intriguing and unique central characters. An exciting author. I will read more of his books.

One person found this helpful

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Debra James

Boring

Reviewed in Australia on 29 April 2014

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I couldnt finish this book, read about 10 chapters but it was sooo boring I didnt care about what happened next......too many books, so little time

One person found this helpful

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Peter Kavanagh

Good Stuff

Reviewed in Australia on 2 May 2014

Set in the murky world of Cairo, this mystery subverts the old story of the child lost in the Arab world with the desperate mother hunting for answers. Multi-layered, complex and intelligent, its a great start to the series.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

S Riaz

The Golden Scales

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 July 2016

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This is the first novel in a series featuring Makana, a former Sudanese policeman, who has fled to Cairo. Like so many fictional detective heroes, Makana has his own personal demons; in his case the loss of his wife and daughter, and his guilt at not attempting to leave Sudan earlier and possibly saving his family. He is a refugee in a country which tolerates him, but in which he is always, essentially, an outsider. Now he works as a private detective and barely ekes out a living; sleeping on a houseboat where his widowed landlady regularly punishes him by turning off the electricity, if his rent arrears get too high.

Considering his precarious, financial position, Makana cannot turn down any work. Especially when the man who sends a car to collect him is not other than wealthy businessman, Saad Hanafi. Among his many businesses (rumoured to be both legal and illegal), Hanafi owns a football team. Now his star player, Adil Romario, has gone missing and Hanafi wants Makana to find him. While investigating the missing football player, Makana meets Liz Markham, an Englishwoman, whose young daughter was snatched from her hotel room seventeen years previously. Now she returns to Cairo regularly, endlessly searching the city, to ease her guilt over her use of drugs, which she blames for her loss.

As Makana begins his search for Romario, he unearths past secrets, corruption and murder. The novel has a great sense of place; with a teeming, crowded, noisy Cairo virtually a character in itself. The extremes of wealth and poverty, the past which intrudes on a brash, almost obscene, sense of entitlement from the new rich, and the generally accepted levels of government and police corruption, all combine to create a cacophony of noise and you can really visualise the small, winding streets and bazaars. Makana himself is, of course, an outsider and you have that threat of Sudan and the past he left behind, also really important to the plot and to him as a character. I will certainly look forward to reading the next in this series.

One person found this helpful

IsaacK

Clunky plot and mediocre writing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 February 2019

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Clunky plot, and mediocre writing. Doesn’t stand out from dozens of light reading books found in airport bookshops. Not good enough to justify reading the other books in the series.

The one redeeming value of the book for me, which justifies the three stars rating, was the subplot describing in a series of flashbacks Makana’s Sudan backstory; it highlights the frightening ease in which a society could decline from a broadly law abiding (albeit not a democratic) state to a lawless state, run by a populist, fundamental and murderous regime.

GeordieReader

Enjoyable start to the series

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 October 2014

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Set in Cairo in 1998, this is a very well-written and interesting crime story with an engaging central character. Makana was formerly a police inspector in his native Sudan but is now eking out a living in the Egyptian capital. The circumstances that led to this situation are pretty grim but this is not a depressing read. There is a lot of humour and the plot is pacy with revelations nicely spaced.

Most readers will guess some of the solution but there are enough surprises to almost provide a satisfying conclusion. I thought the ending was a bit rushed and I would like to know more of how Makana solved the case. However, this is a small fault in a very enjoyable book. I've already downloaded the next in the series and look forward to reading it.

Kindle Customer

Excellent Debut

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 June 2019

Verified Purchase

I read this, the first Makana book, out of sequence,having already read two of the later books. It's an excellent debut. Interesting characters and setting and quality writing.
If you have not yet discovered the series, do so, you will not be disappointed.

Elaine Tomasso

Interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 January 2014

Verified Purchase

I liked the background to this novel - the political shenanigans in both Sudan and Egypt - and I liked Makana as the hero - a decent man in indecent circumstances. The plot was quite convoluted involving high finance, old bitter rivalries, corrupt cops, violent Russians, questions of paternity, Islamic fundamentalism and a dead Englishwoman and should have been gripping but it wasn't. I can't put my finger on exactly what is wrong but the novel just plods along to a conclusion. I didn't feel any tension or a desperate need to find out what was going to happen next but I finished it. I don't think I would buy another in the series as there are better books out there to spend my money on but I'm glad of the insight this one gave me into another world.

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Golden Scales: A Makana Investigation Hardcover – 6 February 2012

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