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The Star Of Istanbul: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (2013)

by Robert Olen Butler(Favorite Author)

3.48 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0802121551 (ISBN13: 9780802121554)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Mysterious Press

series

Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

review 1: Robert Olen Butler's first Kit Marlowe thriller, The Hot Country, absolutely rocked me. Here was a highly literate and respected literary writer( a la Graham Greene) writing in my favorite genre. By the way, Butler's Pulitzer Prize winning book of short stories is worthy of the award; it's great! So I eagerly plucked The Star of Istanbul off the shelf and settled in to read it. From the first page, I realized the second Kit Marlowe mystery was inferior to The Hot Country. Throughout the novel, coincidence dominates. As for Marlowe, he consistently makes choices that an intelligent person with no snooper skills would not make. Marlowe's obsession with movie star and German spy, Selene Bourgani, causes his brain to shut down in favor of other body parts. Not the most flatt... moreering portrayal of males. In any case, I struggled to stay connected to the characters and plot. Perhaps the timing and setting were wrong and distracted me from the book's qualities; perhaps I'm being unfair to Butler, one of the best contemporary American writers. While I'm delighted to see talented writers publishing genre books and earning royalty checks, I hope Butler's next Kit Marlowe thriller reclaims the magic of The Hot Country and that The Star of Istanbul is simply "a sophomore slump."
review 2: A truly honest rating would be somewhere between a 3.5 and 4. The book starts off a bit too lyrically for a spy novel, and the prose just felt way too flowery, getting in the way of the type of taut, to-the-point storytelling one wants in a thriller. But just as I was about to give up, about 50-60 pages in, Butler picks up the pace, pares down his language and the story takes off. Christopher Marlowe Cobb is an interesting enough main character, and the WWI period a convincing timeframe. Plus the setting lends the proper amount of exoticism to the story. Overall, nicely done. less

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