ThrillerAnglais4 h de lecture
The Smyrna Afternoon
de Stephen A. Sayle Écrit avec l'IA
A family vanishes from an Izmir pension overnight, their beds made and their shoes lined up by the door.
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Le livre
In Izmir, Farhad arrives at the Pension Güneş to meet a Baluch mother and her three daughters he and his team are smuggling toward Greece. The landlord tells him they left in the night in a closed white van and left their shoes behind. The beds are made. A child's felt-pen drawing of an aeroplane lies on the mattress. The van, he is told, carried old gold lettering and a picture of a fig.
Farhad buys four lifejackets anyway and signals to his colleague, a woman posing as a French historian. In London, Jonah Ashdown, a retired hostage negotiator of sixty-three, is drawn into the search, and the fig sends him back to Bornova, to a house he last saw in 1987 and to the Corvesi family, whose library his father bought cheaply decades ago. The Contessa receives him in her kitchen and denies everything.
Meanwhile a genial carpet dealer whom exiles call Uncle is watching for an Iranian with a fresh scar, and a lawyer warns that the family may already be on paper as a removal case. Who sent the van, and who is it meant to draw out?
Pour qui. For readers who like slow-burning espionage set in rainy, layered cities, with weary professionals, old family secrets and a rescue that may be a trap.
Le livre et sa présentation sont en anglais.
Les premières lignes
Chapter One
The shop opposite Basmane station had lifejackets in the window at half price, and Farhad, who had come to buy four, was told that the family they were for had left in the night without their shoes.
He was told it by the landlord of the Pension Güneş, which meant sun, and which had not seen any since it was built. The landlord was a heavy, unshaven man in a cardigan who had been standing in his own doorway, waiting to tell somebody, since six in the morning. He told it in Turkish, and then, when he saw that the tall foreigner had only half of it, in the Persian he had picked up from ten years of Iranian guests, which was a language made entirely of prices.
‘Four persons. Room six. Paid to Friday.’ He held up four fingers, then six, then rubbed the fingers together. ‘In the night, a car. They go. This morning I go up. Shoes.’
‘Show me,’ said Farhad.
It was raining in Izmir, a fine grey steady rain off the gulf that the guidebooks did not mention, and it had been raining for the three days he had been there. He followed the cardigan up a staircase that smelled of bleach and frying, past a first floor where somebody was coughing behind every door, to a room at the back with two iron beds and a mattress on the floor between them.