A body is found in the ruined Constantinople hippodrome: a woman, clutching a piece of red stone. She's recently given birth, but there's no sign of the baby. Inspector Cetin Ikmen discovers she was a Byzantine specialist on a crusade to protect the historic but now squalid areas of Istanbul that her enemy, property developer Ahmet Oden, seeks to destroy and rebuild. As Ikmen searches for the lost child and the truth behind her death, the people of...

When Inspector Cetin Ikmen is invited to a murder mystery evening at Istanbul's famous Pera Palas Hotel, he finds himself embroiled in a deadly game of life imitating art. Halfway through the evening, one of the actors is found actually dead in the room where Agatha Christie used to stay when she was in Istanbul. Walking in the steps of the great writer, Ikmen experiences fear and hatred which have echoes deep in his own and his country's past.

Everyone in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Moda knows the Devil's House. A crumbling Ottoman mansion, and once the home of a princess, it is a place associated with ill fortune. The princess's four children, now in old age, still live in separate apartments on different floors and are rumoured never to speak to each other. Then one of them is found dead, stabbed through the heart, and it is discovered that the other three siblings have met an identical...

When historian Suzan Tan is asked to examine the contents of a derelict villa on the Bosphorus, she is intrigued to discover a Ouija board among the artefacts. Forty years ago, a young girl was found with a knife in her heart in this villa. It is said that before her death this very Ouija board spelled out her name. The verdict was suicide - but what if it was a brutal act of murder and her killer was still walking free? Suzan asks retired inspector...

When jeweller Fahrettin Muftuoglu is found dead in his apartment in the Istanbul district of Vefa, it looks like suicide. Searching the jeweller's home, Inspector Mehmet Suleyman and his team come across a hoard of extraordinary artefacts including solid gold religious relics and a mummified human head. But are they real and, if so, who owns these priceless possessions? As his colleagues begin their investigation, Suleyman is distracted by troubles...

Inspector Mehmet Suleyman is on holiday in Romania when his distant cousin calls. Nurettin Suleyman has bought the Wooden Library, an ancient building in Istanbul once owned by their ancestor. He needs help cataloguing its priceless contents and who better for the job than Mehmet's old friend Cetin Ikmen? As Ikmen sets to work, he detects a terrible smell pervading the library that leads to the discovery of a rotting corpse. The dead body is that...