Elliot Ackerman, who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, is known for writing novels set at the burning edges of wars. The beautifully spare “Waiting for Eden” is told by a ghost, the dead comrade of a wounded soldier. An Iraqi-American trying to enter Syria for “his second war” is the focus of “Dark at the Crossing” (a National Book Award finalist), and a young Afghan man guides the reader in Ackerman’s first book, “Green on Blue.” Having worked so impressively at overturning the conventions of war fiction, Ackerman has now written a novel without a single soldier in it.
Who can blame him? He’s decided on a different sort of drama, a territory of intrigue and tricks, entirely absorbing, with other sources of suspense. It’s set in the great city of Istanbul. “Before the protests at Gezi Park, his unfaithful wife had been the largest of his problems.” So thinks Murat, a debt-ridden Turkish real estate developer, early in the book. “He longs for such simple concerns. But the riots, the politics, they have corrupted a system that was once reliably corrupt. A construction license can no longer be bought.” The man’s balance of troubles — a painful marriage eclipsed by a whole country’s instability — points to elements of the plot to come. We will read about a wife who wants to leave her husband, but geopolitics and a “web of interests and counterinterests” will have everything to do with the outcome.
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