Review: Ausma Zehanat Khan’s A Deadly Divide tells truths that non-fiction would struggle to communicate GlobeArts
“Sometimes the monsters we fear aren’t on the opposite side.” Inspector Esa Khattak, one-half of the Community Policing detective duo in Ausma Zehanat Khan’s series of crime novels, utters this line to his partner, Sergeant Rachel Getty. He says this to Rachel for a specific reason: a mass shooting in a mosque located in a small town just over the border where Ottawa meets Gatineau Park, one that will cause untold personal, political and professional complications for the both of them.
Khan has established herself, four years into her career as a published writer, as one of the genre’s most thoughtful practitioners. Khattak and Getty, first introduced in and now on their fifth outing, are cast from the detective mould where they must face the abyss that is staring back at them.
Khan – with a PhD in international human rights law, expertise in the Balkan crisis, and teaching posts at Chicago’s Northwestern University and York University in Toronto – has the confidence and authority to reckon with these larger issues. Her broader-scope explorations, however, do not transforminto a “message” novel and do not detract from the primary aim of storytelling.
This dynamic plays out in a tense scene between the two detectives, when Khattak admits to feeling failure, and Getty expresses fear at his possible abandonment. Here, as in the rest of the novel, Khan portrays the depth of feeling and friendship between her two main characters, and why readers have come to care about them so much.leaves Inspector Khattak and Sergeant Getty at a critical juncture. Old wounds are reopened, and some will heal.
Still, I can’t help but think Khan has barely scratched the surface of what her series can accomplish. There’s so much room for Khattak and Getty to grow, as detectives, and especially as complicated human beings. No doubt Khan will continue to explore, to paraphrase Inspector Khattak, how the enemy who smiles at you as they plot in the dark are the most dangerous ones of all.
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