This was just an okay read for me. I'm glad I read it, but it didn't leave any memorable impressions on me. The only thing I'm clearly able to remember is that I didn't review it right away because I had nothing (good, bad, or indifferent) to say about it.

I won't be reading any future novels if this series is eventually continued.

I received an advance reading copy of this book courtesy of Penwood via Netgalley.

There are twists and turns, and clues to follow in Girls of Yellow.

The first book I read from this author and I enjoyed it.

It's about a world where modern governments fail their citizens and long-simmering conflicts escalate into global war.

This book had many good points and was an interesting story. Kind of scary how the world could get so bad.

A dystopian story that diverts from the norm and becomes a mystery/thriller story. This book kept me guessing until the very end but I especially liked the use of a world that we know, but has been distorted in the future.

Lovely cover that drew me to the book. The book was lovely. A feel good read perfect for this time of year lazing on holiday or in the garden. It was easy to read and well written. Great read

Forest Stelmach knows how to tell a story! This one pulled me in from the first page to the last; an exquisite example of contemporar crime fiction at its very best, packed with wonderful layers of subplot, dramatic dialogue and believable characters. Highly recommended!"

This wasn't exactly what I was hoping for when I started this book. I was hoping for something different. I got about half way through and just couldn't finish it. The cover art is beautiful though.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Who can say no to a mix of mystery and dystopian fiction? This book had a lot of promise and I was incredibly intrigued to read it. The idea of imagining a world where the continents were ruled by religion is something that grabbed my attention, especially with all the focus nowadays on region and persecution.

For me, the book was only ok. It didn't quite live up to my (admittedly high) expectations. I found some of the religious ideas to be a little problematic (pro Christian and anti Islamic vibes) and the beginning was very slow. Once the action started I found it a lot more of a compelling read, but it took a while to get going, which was disappointing.

This is the first book in a series. I will consider reading the next one, although I'm not totally sold on the idea just yet.

I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. My opinions in this review are my own.

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you NetGalley!!

As another review said, id' say this was a spy, murder mystery thriller all wrapped in one.
There were a LOT of slow areas for me, and unfortuatenly, i had to FORCE myself to finish this book.

The author wrote a thriller that started with a bang and just kept going! The twists kept coming, so I couldn't put it down. I cannot wait to read more from this author!

For me this book has everything. A crime murder mystery and a spy thriller wrapped into one.

Within Europe, we have had various police procedurals and spies coming in from the cold. Then the threat moved from Communism to Islamic fundamentalism.
This becomes tired; fresh angles are sought, new detective teams fashioned or seek out dramatic or stunning locations. Humanise the characters with vices beyond alcoholism or corruption.

Well this book rips that all up and starts from a new made up reality.

After World War III and nuclear destruction the world has polarised around the great faiths. Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Like ethnic cleansing the populations were advised to gravitate to their own religious areas or live as second class citizens in a theocracy that does not reflect or encourage their beliefs.

The Dhimmi are non-Muslim citizens who have chosen to stay in a territory that is an Islamic State where they are granted protection, freedom of religion but with an expectation to pay taxes and abide by the prevailing laws.

This is a story in this new diaspora set in Budapest which is now in Eurabia and under Islamic law.
This is a great location and the book using this former capital to the full; with references to how Muslim faith and history have supplanted the previous dynasties and government rule.
It is a great canvas upon which the author paints his wonderful fiction; in a world that is both familiar and believable, as it is a story of excesses and human frailties.
Budapest is host to an Intertheocratic Conference so the Eurasian Caliphate want to avoid anything to undermine their rule and achievements.
When the body of a young dhimmi girl is found in the main Catholic Cathedral Major Sami Ali is given the case due in no small part because of his lackadaisical approach to crime investigations.
Meanwhile a Christian Spy is in town for both an official and personal mission. Elise De Jong is a resourceful fluent Arabic speaker who is prepared to risk all for her dual assignments.
When Ali is stirred by the resemblencte of the victim to a girl in his past rather than bury the investigation he becomes a driven conscience-led detective rekindling the merits of his faith and following Muslim tradition to seek justice in this matter. His bosses are appalled by this epiphany and do all they can to make him see sense; that his job, career and family are at stake.
I loved his novel from start to finish. Full of clever insights into this reality. It all fits wonderfully together and gives the author scope to examine faith, fundamentalism, patronage, hypocrisy and double standards within wealth and power.
However, nothing should distract from the excellently plotted crime thriller that looks at:
The persistency in police work rather than flashes of brilliance.
The dangers of faith when other religions are not respected.
The path between a religious zeal and mental health. The power of confession and the co-operation between different faiths.
The equality of gender, sexual orientation, in opportunity and status.
So much to commend this book - but all just words unless the story delivers. Which it does beyond anyone’s expectations
Great concept, rings true and with a joined up scenario. A terrific multi/layered story.

A dhimmi is a non-Muslim that lives in a Muslim region. He or she is allowed to retain their own faith, but is constantly persecuted, much like the Jews in Nazi controlled areas during WWII. Police Major Sami Ali lives and works in Budapest, where dhimmis are hated and many are enslaved. It is common practice for young girls to be taken from their homes or sold to people who groom them to become obedient to their masters. Ali has taken a vow to hate all Christians and Jews, so when he has to investigate the murder of a young, blonde dhimmi he is expected to sweep the murder under the carpet. Maybe it is because he has a young daughter at home, or maybe he feels compassion in a dispassionate world, it just seems wrong to ignore her death. Whatever the reason, he begins a real investigation into her death, and finds out she is not the first young, pretty blond dhimmi to be murdered.

Elise De Jong is in Budapest on official business. She works as a translator, but today she is on a mission of her own. Her sister was sold at birth by their drug addicted mother. De Jong has traced her to a religious slave training school, and is desperately trying to contact her to clandestinely take her away from slavery before it is too late.

Ali and De Jong meet in unfortunate circumstances. They are both living lies and each true to themselves no matter the outcome. Their unlikely alliance might be the only chance each of them has to find the answers they both seek.

I have to admit that the first few chapters were slow for me. It is understood that the background of the wars, rules for the Muslim countries and settings has to be established. I am so glad I didn’t give up. When the pace picked up, the characters came alive. By the time I got to the end I could not read fast enough to find out what would happen next. Book 2 of the series will be set in the “land formerly known as the United States”, so I am anxious to read it also.

This is the first book I have read by Mr. Stelmach, but not the first he has written. He writes thrillers and mysteries and is the author of the Nadia Tesla series, which are Kindle #1 bestsellers and have been optioned for film development. We need to read them now! Everyone knows that the book is so much better than the movie.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: I have a material connection because I received a review copy for free from BookBuzz and Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Copyright © 2019 Laura Hartman

I would describe this as a futuristic crime thriller which was an intriguing premise. I found a lot of the characters quite unlikable and they didn't draw me in. I felt there was a bit of negativity with some aspects of the book that I didn't really like.

A futuristic crime thriller, Girls of Yellow, while not without flaws was an entertaining read. In the author's version of the future, the world has been divided according to religion, with Islam being the official religion of what we now call Hungary. While people may choose to retain their old faith , or not adhere to any, they are still subject to strict sharia law and must pay crippling taxes. Often treated as second class citizens, they are living in poverty on the margins of society. When the body of a young "girl of yellow" i.e. a girl with blonde hair is found, pressure is put on police officer Sami Ali to brush the case under the carpet and close it as quickly as possible, but he feels an obligation to find out what really happened. When he learns that this is just the latest " girl of Yellow" found ,he soon realises that he may have bitten off more than he can chew. Along the way his path crosses that of our second narrator, Elise. an undercover agent who has a personal mission to save her sister.
The writing is engaging and the plot moves quickly. The characters are interesting if not always likeable, and the author does a good job of describing his disturbing vision of the future. However I did find that the book was not without flaws, most notably the islamophobic tone throughout. While I could accept a certain amount of negativity necessary to portray the fictional regime, I thought the author went far beyond what was necessary to do this, and at times the book left an unpleasant taste in my mouth for this reason.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

A combination of a mystery thriller and a dystopia is fairly irresistible. Certainly enough to take a chance on a new author. And so I did. To somewhat mixed results, but…interesting. Girls of Yellow are the victims, their blondeness makes them exotic in a brave new world of the author’s imagination wherein following a global war the civilization became divided via their belief systems, resulting in four individual governable sectors. Europe became Eurabia, governed strictly in accordance to the law of the land, a prosperous, but obviously very conservative place to live. There are still those who remain in the region but have not converted, unwelcome and more along the lined of second class citizens. It is a daughter of one of these families that is found murdered and a detective Ali becomes obsessed with solving the crime. In his investigation he meets Elise, a woman out of place, on a private mission. The two are as different as a proper movie pair of mismatched cops, but are able to assist each other and even reach a sort of mutual understanding. The murder mystery plot is decent, but nowhere near as intriguing or original as the world split into theocracies and, sadly, the book doesn’t actually spend as much time on the latter as it ought to. Presumably because this story that works perfectly well as a standalone is meant to be unnecessarily serialized and this way the world building can continue and maybe even cover different places on this newly redrawn map. The writing was pretty good, the author obviously has the chops to entertain an audience, although the general politics of Eurabia might come across…skewed, biased, polemical, hostile, propagandish…take your pick. I imagine that might put off some readers. Elise and Ali make for very compelling leads, especially Ali, who is a man often torn between tradition and instinct, while genuinely striving to be his best self. Don’t know if that means the two should have a series, but then again that never really seems like a serious consideration, which is probably the reason for so many thriller series out there. The Netgalley ARC had some typos and editing snafus that presumably would be taken care of for the final product. Just ok. Thanks Netgalley.

I struggled through the first quarter of this book because I found the main character very unlikable. However, the premise, characters and story-line were interesting and did eventually grab and hold my interest. I think this may be the start of a series and I'm interested to see where this story goes.

I did have a major problem with this book and it was the editing. There were a lot of typos and at one point Elise's name was written as Alice. I read the kindle version and the formatting was terrible. There were paragraph breaks where there shouldn't have been, and breaks missing where there should have been one. Sentences ran together and punctuation was missing in a way that it was hard to tell which character was speaking. Also, there was a part where a few random lines where in a font several sizes larger than the rest of the book. I found the editing and formatting issues very distracting.

Plot twist until the very last sentence, this book has.

In a dystopia, where countries (?) continents (?) were divided according to their religion, a murder takes place and Major Ali wants to find out the murderer. A strange woman, Elise, crosses his path.

The book alternates each chapter between the two main persons, Ali and Elise. Due to a strange coincidence they meet. Once you get to use to this, this story goes fast and is very compelling. After the start of which I did struggle to understand, having forgot the description about the dystopia, the story took off. I haven't read such a compelling story in a long while. On top of that, the setting made this whodunnit quite unique.

Even with a strong pro-christian/anti-islam bias, it is most definetly worth a read.

I wasn't a fan of this book. There was a somewhat islamophobic element to it that I wasn't fond of and it didn't engage me enough to finish reading it.