A British critic described Baghdad Central as film noir in the desert, and it’s pretty apt: a murder investigation takes place in Iraq right after the U.S. invasion, and the most twisted rivalries are not between Sunni and Shia but between Americans and their British coalition allies. The story centers around a former Iraqi police detective who, while trying to find a missing daughter, gets recruited—shanghaied, really—to work for occupation forces inside the Green Zone. As thrillers go, this one lies somewhere between a Bernie Gunther book by Philip Kerr and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. —Alessandra Stanley