Blurb:

Be twice as good as men and four times as good as white men.

Jia Khan has always lived like this.

Successful London lawyer Jia Khan is a long way from the grubby Northern streets she knew as a child, where her father, Akbar Khan, led the Pakistani community and ran the local organised crime syndicate. Often his Jirga rule – the old way – was violent and bloody, but it was always justice of a kind.

Now, with her father murdered, Jia must return to take his place. The police have always relied on the Khan to maintain the fragile order of the streets. But a bloody power struggle has broken out among warring communities and nobody is safe.

Justice needs to be restored, and Jia is about to discover that justice always comes at a cost.

Review:

I was recommended The Khan by two different people. It is very different to anything I would normally read, but nevertheless I really enjoyed it and I appreciated the angle from which Mir explores the subject of organised crime. At first, I found it tricky to get my head around exactly who was who in the Khan family, but I loved the way these characters were constructed and I felt able to really get under their skin, particularly Jia, who has a tough exterior but is definitely vulnerable. Mir blurs the lines between good and bad and she does this brilliantly, giving me lots of food for thought about the characters’ lifestyles.

The Khan is set in Bradford, which meant I was able to recognise some of the locations within the novel. Mir’s sense of place is very strong and this made it very easy for me to picture what was happening.

The ending of The Khan is very explosive and I was interested to see how this would play out. When this was coupled with a sense of danger, it became incredibly tense and I was on the edge of my seat wondering how it would end.

The Khan is available from Amazon.