From the inner life of Istanbul to the Deep South

The Janissary Tree
By Jason Goodwin
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 320 pp., $25

Brandenburg Gate
By Henry Porter
Atlantic Monthly, 448 pp., $24

Chiefs
By Stuart Woods
Norton, 432 pp., $23.95

An Irish friend observed the other day that when he moved to Kilkenny, Ireland, in the 1960s, the city's population numbered around 10,000. Today, according to him, Kilkenny has roughly that many Polish residents. It's possible. What struck me on a recent visit, however, was not so much the abundance of foreign workers as the weirdly imperial attitude that their presence has bestowed on Ireland. Need your house cleaned, your garden dug? Get a Pole/Latvian/Estonian.

It's chastening to recall that Poland once had its own empire -- real, not of the mind -- a fact stressed by a most engaging character in Jason Goodwin's immensely engaging first novel, ''The Janissary Tree." Stanislaw Palieski is the Polish ambassador to Istanbul in 1836, a time when the still resplendent Ottoman Empire is changing. The New Guard, having defeated its rival, the charismatic Janissary Corps, in 1826, now wears not only the trousers but also ''the buttoned tunic . . . and shoal of braid and epaulettes . . . signaling a new, up-to-the-minute attitude to the business of war." But have the vengeful Janissaries returned? When four New Guard cadets disappear, their commander orders Investigator Yashim to follow the grisly clues.

Assisted by Palieski and by a male/female dancer (you'll see), Yashim, who happens to be a eunuch, unravels a dastardly plot. He also does much more. A master of observation, Yashim explores the inner life of Istanbul and the imperial harem, where ''the sultan, . . . in the cohort of imperial concubines, was simply a major piston of an engine designed to guarantee the continuous production of Ottoman sultans."

Goodwin, who wrote a splendid history of the Ottoman Empire titled ''Lords of the Horizons," folds historical facts and social details delicately into the novel while expertly choreographing each revelation and animating a character with a single inspired description. ''Yashim felt a wave of pity for the seraskier [commander], in his Western uniform, his efficient boots, his buttoned tunic. These were symbols he endured, not knowing exactly why, like one of those simpletons in the bazaar who feel that no medicine is good unless it causes some pain. Magic boots, magic buttons."

Like his hero, Goodwin possesses a sly, merciless wit, which augurs well for subsequent novels in the Inspector Yashmin series. The same cannot be said for ''Brandenburg Gate," a Cold War potboiler by British journalist Henry Porter, who also attempts to portray an unraveling totalitarian system -- in this case the German Democratic Republic -- but who succeeds only when he escapes the long shadow of John le Carré or the bulkier one of Tom Clancy. In 1989, Trieste is ''the edge of the void that separated East and West, a decorous no man's land of grand cafes and squares that looked like ballrooms." Here a convoluted plan is hatched involving a former Stasi agent and his imprisoned brother, British and American intelligence agencies, Stasi sadists, Middle Eastern terrorists, a beautiful English spy, and a passionate East German heroine. The sadists and their torture chambers are convincing at least, unlike the tendency of the intelligence agents to keep explaining the plot to the hero and to each other. Let's not even talk about the sex.

Stuart Woods, by contrast, kept things admirably simple when he wrote ''Chiefs," a novel now republished in a 25th-anniversary edition and still evocative in its portrayal of white rule in the American South. ''Hugh Holmes, president of the Bank of Delano and chairman of the Delano City Council, was a man who, more than most, thought about the present in terms of the future," the novel begins, ''but on a cold morning in December of 1919, this faculty failed him." By choosing Will Henry Lee, a poor white cotton farmer, to be the Georgia town's first police chief, Holmes becomes the unwitting catalyst in a series of murders that will be carried out between 1920 and 1963. Those particular crimes have nothing to do with race. But everything else does. The tragic killing of Lee, who becomes obsessed with the first murders but whose own death is almost accidental; the intimidation and killing of an African-American car mechanic who is insufficiently deferential to a local police officer; the rise of Lee's idealistic son, Billy, in local and state government as the civil rights movement reaches even his Georgia backwater; all hinge on an assumed right to rule.

Change arrives in Delano with Tucker Watts, the first African-American police chief. ''As Tucker stepped around the corner of the house he saw a black man cowering on the ground. Bobby Patrick, his back to Tucker, stood over him, unsnapping a leather blackjack from his pistol belt. A woman and three small children stood on the back porch, clutching at each other, terrified." Woods may have a weakness for such tableaux and for too neatly grafting his characters onto history (before he goes to Dallas, President Kennedy tells Billy Lee that when he returns he wants to talk to him about the vice presidency), but this cannot diminish the enduring power of this simple epic.

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.