The Desert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones
The gist: the scholar Dabir and the soldier Asim are in service to an official of Harun al-Rashid, the Abbasid caliph of 8th century Baghdad. When a man with a strange treasure is murdered in front of their master, Dabir and Asim receive the task of figuring out the mystery. Soon they discover a sinister sorcerer’s plot to destroy Baghdad in vengeance, and the scholar and the soldier must fight bandits, sorcery, monsters, and the misplaced wrath of their own master to save the day.
The book’s a touch hard to classify – on the one hand, it’s historical fiction (and as someone who occasionally has a semi-professional position in history, I can appreciate Jones’s attention to historical accuracy). However, there’s also sorcery, and it veers into science fiction in a few places. Some of Robert E. Howard’s best work (“The Tower of the Elephant”, for instance) blends those genre lines as well – the monsters Conan encounters are not devils but in fact aliens.
In some of the reviews I read, much was made over the fact that the book’s two protagonists are Muslims. I was a bit worried that “The Desert of Souls” would be one of those smugly preaching sort of books where the villain turns is an ahistorical 8th-century clone of George Bush or whatever, and Dabir stops the book for fifty pages to lecture his readers on the virtues of tolerance and free love.
Fortunately, this is not the case. “Souls” is both a fine work of historical fiction and sword-and-sorcery (I especially like the scene when the necromancer conjures the ghost of Tiglath-Pileser III in the ruins of Nimrud), and I recommend it.
-JM