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  • The Golden Scales

  • A Makana Mystery, Book 1
  • By: Parker Bilal
  • Narrated by: David Thorpe
  • Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (23 ratings)
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The Golden Scales cover art

The Golden Scales

By: Parker Bilal
Narrated by: David Thorpe
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Summary

Makana, a former police inspector who fled from Sudan to Cairo, lives on a rickety Nile houseboat. When the notorious and powerful Saad Hanafi hires him to track down a missing person, Makana is in no position to refuse him. Hanafi is the owner of Cairo’s star-studded football team; his most valuable player has just vanished and Adil Romario’s disappearance threatens to bring down not only Hanafi’s private empire but the entire country. But why should the city’s most powerful man hire its lowliest private detective?

Makana’s investigation leads him into the treacherous underbelly of his adopted country - where he encounters Muslim extremists, Russian gangsters, and a desperate mother hunting for her missing daughter.

©2012 Parker Bilal (P)2012 Oakhill Publishing

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Good story, wrong narrator

Is there anything you would change about this book?

I enjoyed the story and will likely read more in the series. However, I found the narration painful to listen to, and eventually bought the Kindle edition so I could finish the story without listening to it. The narrator attempts different foreign accents for each of the characters and while he does well to distinguish the individual characters, the accents were not remotely Egyptian or Sudanese – they sounded more generically Eastern European. In addition, his pronunciation of many of the Arabic words was entirely wrong. As someone who lived for many years in Cairo, I found this too difficult to listen to. This may not be a problem for listeners who are not familiar with Egypt or Arabic.

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2 people found this helpful