Ausma Zehanat Khan is the dizzyingly accomplished author of five novels and a short story featuring the unlikely pairing (in a genuinely innovative take on the trope) of Muslim Canadian senior investigator Esa Khattak and the perceptive and dogged but insecure Rachel Getty. They work together on a unique initiative, a Toronto-based community policing team directed to address particularly sensitive crimes within a multicultural context.
The first novel in the series, The Unquiet Dead, sets the tone: while Khattak and Getty are tasked with local investigations, their work inevitably connects them to international political and cultural upheavals, in this case the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in the former Yugoslovia. They discover that the man whose death they are investigating, victim of a possibly accidental fall that proves to be more complicated, was living in Canada under an assumed identity that concealed his horrifying history.
Over the course of the series, Zehanat Khan explores a range of complex, timely, and painful issues, with a focus on the fierce determination of the family survivors of murder victims to achieve justice.
In A Deadly Divide, Getty and Khattak are called to a small Quebec city near Ottawa where twenty people, including a child, have been gunned down in a mosque. While Zehanat Khan does not linger gratuitously on violence, there are striking images of ethnically-fuelled and racist harm, including a key image of the fleur-de-lys, a potent Quebec nationalist symbol that appears on the provincial flag but is used viciously here to assert dominance and exclusion.
As in all of the novels in the series, the author shifts between the very different perspectives of Khattak, who is especially personally affected in this novel, and Getty, who stands in for non-Muslim Canadian readers seeking to understand cultural and religious practices.
Zehanat Khan treats topics that have frequently been polarizing in Canada, such as women who wear the niqab, with sensitivity, sympathy, and nuance. She pays close attention to the defeat of Quebec’s proposed Charte de la laïcité, which sought to ban people providing or receiving public services in the province from wearing visible religious symbols, while also requiring faces not to be covered in these public service contexts, including teaching or the practice of medicine.
A Deadly Divide was published in 2019, the same year that a revised version of the contentious Charter was passed as Bill 21. The law has been critiqued as targeting Muslim women, and legal challenges to its validity are ongoing. The Supreme Court of Canada will hear the appeal this winter.
Zehanat Khan’s characters represent a range of stances, including a group of young women with close but fraught ties to Muslim men they’ve met at the local university. The Wolf Allegiance, and their charismatic leader, espouse anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and racist views. They’re egged on by a local talk-radio host with sinister far-right leanings. But more puzzlingly for Rachel and Esa, the town itself–which espoused a conduct code with parallels to the secularization law–seems to include people in positions of power who sympathize with racist factions while attempting to conceal their involvement–perhaps even in the mosque massacre.
The personal lives of the protagonists are also central here. Esa is longing to reunite with the woman he loves, who is working with refugees in Greece, but he is uncertain she shares his feelings; Rachel, in turn, is attracted to a new colleague, but his decisions during the investigation raise doubts about whether he is trustworthy. To further complicate matters, Esa’s attention is divided between the case, his hopes for marriage, and his intense feelings of protectiveness for a young journalism student whom he encountered during a previous investigation into the death of her sister. Both Rachel and Esa struggle to manage the escalating demands of a tragic, high-profile investigation with multiple political and cultural pressures.
As with several of Zehanat Khan’s novels in this series, there is a real-life precedent: on January 29th, 2017, a gunman opened fire as a mosque in a Quebec City suburb, killing six people and seriously injuring several other victims in the prayer hall. The culprit was found guilty of murder and attempted murder and is serving a life sentence; he was not charged with terrorism, however, despite the apparently targeted nature of the attack. Canada now marks January 29th as The National Day of Remembrance of the Quebec Mosque Attack and of Action Against Islamophobia.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 
Leave a comment