My Name Is Red

A murder mystery narrated, in part, by a corpse, a dog, a coin, a tree, and the color crimson. In 16th-century Istanbul, the sultan's master miniaturists are producing a secret book in the European style — an act some consider heresy. When one of them is killed, the investigation spirals into a meditation on art, faith, representation, and the fault line between East and West. Pamuk constructs an Ottoman whodunit that is also a philosophical argument about whether a painting should show the world as God sees it or as the human eye does. The Istanbul here is magnificent and dangerous — a city of workshops and mosques where the wrong brushstroke can get you killed.