The Citadel

Amir Duran #1

by John Ward

Detective Amir Omar Duran was just a boy when the British invaded his beloved Granada. Now—after two decades of colonial rule—the ancient city of winding alleys and iconic architecture is a smoldering caldron of corruption, poverty and strife.

On the eve of a political summit between the city’s wrangling factions, Amir is dispatched to Granada’s torrid outskirts to investigate the unusual death of an African migrant. When the investigation puts Amir at odds with some of Granada’s most powerful men, Agent Brit Tillman is assigned by The British Crown to keep a watchful eye.

As more shocking evidence is unearthed, Amir and Brit must form an alliance to foil a dark conspiracy and uncover the man behind it. And in a city full of unsavory businessmen, desperate refugees, and hard-boiled spies, almost everyone is a suspect.

139 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 3, 2017

About the author

John Ward is a government affairs and communications professional specializing in criminal justice reform, economic development and social service innovation. In a prior, weirder life, he was a hip-hop artist and producer. Seriously. He lives in Boston with his wife, two sons and an old, smelly dog.

Reviews

[Amy Salvatore · Rating 4 out of 5]

First time writer, John Ward, has a lot on his mind. Geo-politcal tensions, post colonial legacy, and cultural domination figure as prominent thematic strands woven through this ambitious crime thriller, The Citadel. The protagonist is Amir Duran, a hardboiled Muslim cop living and working in a post-apocalyptic Granada, Spain. Twenty years earlier a plague ravaged the globe, leaving Great Britain as one of the world powers left holding the cards. The civilization Britain managed to carve out from what was left of the population benefits the rulers at the expense of people of color. Africans, who live in little more than refugee camps to work on farms, provide the cheap labor. Sound familiar? History repeats itself as the exploited workers make demands for a better life, and leaders of various factions and interests come together for a political summit where the poor will almost certainly gain nothing. Added to this context is the tension by an insistent Russia, of course, still around and ready to make a grab for what remains of the tenuous political order. The pressures of this future Europe seem strikingly similar to the old.

This labyrinthine mosaic is the backdrop of a murder investigation of an African farm worker, whose brutal killing has the mark of a professional murder. Chain smoking and secretly devout Muslim, Amir Duran, is on the case and soon finds that there is more involved in this crime than just another killing among unruly “savages”. Duran is a character we will see further developed in Ward’s other novels slated for publication at a later date. He is a product of his times, discontented and leery of the social construct cobbled together after a cataclysmic world event. Yet, there is something of the old world about him in his dedication to his son, James, and the memory of his grandfather, Jeddo. The Granada he now lives in bears only the bones of the great city he knew as a child before it was seized by Great Britain. Despite his cynical demeanor, he is often prone to reveries where he imagines his grandfather speaking to him about faith and life and God’s will. But, he is a man at odds with his faith and the hard scrabble life of people who live in his sector, a world torn apart by corruption, greed, and class warfare.

Driven to solve this crime, he is joined by a woman from the very establishment Amir loathes. Brit Tillman works for the new world equivalent of MI6. Together they make an unlikely team, but that is why Ward has pushed them together. As a woman in the macho world of espionage, she is always second guessed, and Amir, an Arab Muslim citizen of Spanish Grenada, is never taken seriously by those who have relegated him and his countrymen to the status of servants to a greater power. Together they make a formidable duo who will continue to join forces in upcoming installations.

The book is fast moving and jumps at a dizzying pace from characters and setting. The plot thrusts the reader into a current of compelling plot twists and complex real politic. However, it is Ward’s writing that stands out to me. He writes beautifully. While Ward’s dialogue is the standard vulgar invective of hardened men, it is his lapses into the poetic realm of memory when I am reminded of Michael Ondaatje or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He is clearly an author who loves language, and his descriptions, hell, even his sentence structure and word choices are lovely, dexterous and artful. In fact, my hope is that Ward will write a more literary book far and away from the formula of the crime thriller/mystery where he can explore the soul of a story. For now, though, we have a young author who is a Ken Follet of a new generation, one borne out of the ashes of post war sensibilities and grievances, who sizes up our civilization and its discontents with a wary eye but a fresh voice.

[Sophie Godley · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know when your friend writes a book and you're nervous to read it because, you know, what if it's not good? HA! My friend John Ward's first mystery was a blast and has it all -- a chain-smoking detective with a dirty mouth, an intriguing plot line, a dystopian future state.... and the writing is gorgeous and evocative. Can't wait for the next in the series.