Jason Goodwin's Janissary Tree is a mystery/thriller set in the closing days of the Ottoman Empire. It feels like the thriller plot is constructed to get us into a bunch of "interesting" places, as a sort of tour. So we spend some time in the Sultan's quarters in Topkapi Palace, some time in a slum, some time in a Turkish bath, and so on. Goodwin's very good at scene-building, and I think that if I were looking for a panoramic view of Istanbul in that period, I could do worse.
Unfortunately, he's not so good at the thriller-writing parts. The underlying plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense as soon as you step back and think about it. It makes a James Bond plot seem down-to-earth. On top of that, there are scenes that feel taken straight out of a Bond movie. Yashim, a functionary in the sultan's court fights a trained assassin hand-to-hand; there's no way he should survive for one minute, never mind winning. Elsewhere he's locked in a Turkish Bath and left to die -- why not just kill him and leave? That's almost Dan Brown-level stupidity.
On another note, War & Peace has too many damn essays. It's a great book, and I'm really enjoying it, but I'm getting tired of hearing how much Napoleon is not a military genius and how much Kutuzov connected with the soul of the Russian people. The essays make a good case for an edited version, but they'd probably on shave 30 pages off the text, probably not even worth doing.
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