Brides of Blood

More than a decade after the dawn of Iran's Islamic Republic, Darius Bakhtiar still chafes under the harsh yoke of Sharia law. He is an alcoholic in a country where intoxication is punishable by whipping, and a homicide detective in a society that sees death as an opportunity for martyrdom. In Teheran, a young woman is found murdered, but her makeup and scanty clothing mark her as a prostitute, and Bakhtiar's superiors tell him to make only a cursory inquiry. But what he uncovers suggests that this brutal killing was not random, and points to a sickening hypocrisy at the heart of the fundamentalist government.

Few outside the Ayatollah's inner sanctum know of the Brides of Blood. A sect of virgin zealots, these women live and die for the afterlife, killing infidels to gain a seat in heaven. As he digs deeper into the conspiracy, Bakhtiar learns that in a religious dictatorship, there is nothing more dangerous than asking questions.

Joseph Koenig is an author of hard-boiled fiction. A former crime reporter, he won critical acclaim and an Edgar nomination for his first novel, Floater (1986), a grimly violent story of con men, cops, and killers in the Florida Everglades. His next two novels were Little Odessa (1988), a darkly comic tale of life in New York's Ukrainian underworld, and Smugglers Notch (1989), a story of brutal murder in snowbound Vermont. Koenig's fourth novel, the groundbreaking Brides of Blood (1993), won strong reviews for its elegant treatment of police procedure in Islamic Iran. For nearly two decades after Brides of Blood, Koenig did not publish. But in 2012 the pulp-style publishing house Hard Case Crime released his newest novel, False Negative, a rollicking mystery about a journalist who, like Koenig once did, writes for true-crime magazines.