The Burgas Affair (2017) by Ellis Shuman
GoodReads meta-data is 327 pages rated 4.0 by 48 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: [Grrrr.]
A bus loaded with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria is bombed on the way to a Black Sea coastal resort. A joint Israeli-Bulgarian investigation follows. Sort of…
A Bulgarian detective who is a man’s man, constantly smoking, drinking, and cursing, and having a pissing contest with every other man he meets, is half of one team; the other is a Mossad data analyst who has never been in the field before, but her father came from Bulgaria and she has a smattering of the language. The set-up is promising, combining spreadsheets with head banging.
What follows is a disjointed series of backstories, punctuated by Man’s Man clumsy efforts to rape/seduce the Israeli who proves resistant to his crude efforts. None of it is played for laughs, and we all know that in time she will relent because he is, after all, a man’s man. The clichés abound without any substance. Blind Freddy spotted the mole about two hundred pages before Man’s-Man did.
Nor is the Israeli any better. After riding for several hours in a car just as bored as the reader is, she is asked to drive for a while, and after taking the driver’s seat goes ballistic to find the car has a stick shift and not an automatic transmission. Was she asleep for the preceding four hours when they drove down the road that she didn’t notice the gear changes up and down the hills of eastern Bulgaria with her single companion driving. And she is an intelligence analyst. Doh! (Don’t blame her, she is written that way.)
Much is made of identifying the bomber in the first half of the book and then this theme disappears. Evidently it did not really matter that much. It seems there was little reason to follow the trail.
There is some to’ing and fro’ing in Bulgaria and I preferred that travelogue to listening to that man’s man feel sorry for himself. What a snowflake! Nor is the Israeli any more interesting. A five-second scan of the reviews on GoodReads reminded me why I never bother to do that.
The mechanical Turk alerted me to this title after I read a concise history of Bulgaria. I tried the sample and found it not to my taste but assuming there were not many Bulgarian krimis in English and this might be the only one to hand, even the best one, I persisted. Grrr, as above.