Brief Mention: LAST SEEN IN LAPAZ, by Kwei Quartey

Collecting international crime fiction? Ghana-born physician and author Kwei Quartey's Darko Dawson series, set mostly in Ghana, has been a pleasure; Quartey's current series is a spinoff that features Emma Djan, a private detective always alert to gender discrimination as she works her way up in a local agency (the police force dumped her, early in the series).

LAST SEE IN LAPAZ opens with the disappearance of a young Nigerian woman, daughter of a friend of the agency owner. (Lapaz is a town in the Accra Metropolitan District -- not related at all to La Paz, New Mexico.)  The attractive and hard-working Ngozi seems to have run away from home, across the national border, and might be in Accra. If, that is, she's alive.

Emma Djan isn't yet authorized to do a lot of investigation on her own, but she has an advantage here, because she can perform a flirtatious role with the greedy (in every sense) hotel owners who seem linked to the disappearance. When one hotel turns out to be supplying female companions, perhaps forced into this upscale prostitution, Emma's both horrified and fascinated. Anything to avoid the boredom of routine PI work!

Her insight into women's lives also gives her an advantage as she investigates with Boateng, the local DI (inspector on the police force):

Boateng grunted. "You seem to be studying this room closely, Djan. What do you see?"

"No disorder, no chaos. It has a controlled feeling. Someone who has been in this room was trying to gain control over the other, but couldn't quite do it. ... This entire house is a clue."

Despite his California location, Quartey's writing continues to have the choppy feel of translated material, possibly an intentional effect to suggest the movement among local languages and dialects. The book suffers somewhat from quick changes in point of view, among investigators and criminals. But it's still a revelatory experience of urban life in Ghana, and neatly plotted, with caste and related attitudes deftly portrayed. 

Collect it for your African mystery shelf, as well as for the diverse spread of Soho Crime's continued global outreach.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

New Lynley Investigation from Elizabeth George, SOMETHING TO HIDE

 [Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Elizabeth George can really spin a great investigation when she’s not trying so hard to teach the shocking discoveries she has made in her own explorations.”

Elizabeth George’s mysteries featuring Scotland Yard investigators Barbara Havers and Thomas Lynley began with A Great Deliverance in 1988. Now her 21st book in the series, Something to Hide, probes life and death in the Nigerian community of North London, along with the custom of female genital mutilation (FGM).

For those new to George’s work, the 687-page book isn’t likely to carry them into loving the series, because the noted Scotland Yard investigators don’t come into the action until page 119. And for readers who treasure Lynsley and Havers, that’s also a problem—chapters cascading about people who are in emotional and physical pain, in the midst of a socioeconomic disaster.

George clearly has done massive amounts of research for this book. Unfortunately, that message keeps coming back, when instead it might have been far more effective to simplify the plot a bit, and let the research take a backstage role.

The meeting in which Lynsley comes onto the case sums up the positioning of his investigation, in a politically challenging time:

“In [Lynley’s] morning meeting with Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hiller and the head of the Press Office, Stephen Deacon, the political concerns of both men had been writ large enough and dark enough for a mole in sunlight to read them. … Teo Bontempi was not only a police detective, she was a Black police detective. The last thing the Metropolitan Police needed to have hurled at them was an accusation that not enough was being thrown into the investigation because the office in question was Black or female or both. Racism, sexism, misogyny … There could not be a whisper of any of this during the investigation and did the Acting Detective Chief Superintendent understand what was being said?”

Even after this, the book is plagued by too many points of view and not enough agency. Series readers, who’ll want to tackle this anyway, may do best to skip “Part I” in order to leap into the investigation. Newcomers to the Lynsley books should probably try an earlier title.

That said, if this weren’t a “genre” book – that is, a Scotland Yard investigation – it might stand as an imposing literary probe of Nigerian/North London culture. Perhaps that’s how it should instead be shelved. But then the author would need to take out the endless attempts at Black language, wouldn’t she?

There are better books to stack on the bedside table or take to a desert island. Which is a shame, because Elizabeth George can really spin a great investigation when she’s not trying so hard to teach the shocking discoveries she has made in her own explorations.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Nigerian Mystery: FOREIGN GODS INC, Okey Ndibe

From Nigerian Okey Ndibe, who teaches African literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut -- and whose political commentaries have a long track record (http://www.okeyndibe.com/index.html) -- comes a crime novel that crosses Donald Westlake with Saul Bellow and Joseph Conrad. Published through Soho Press (not the Crime division), it challenges genre boundaries and indulges in a delicious chunk of paranormal ... or is it all in the mind of Ikechukwu Uzondu after all?

This upscale cab driver with the nickname of Ike -- not pronounced like Eisenhower's nickname, but rather as "Ee-kay" -- was named "God's strength" in his Nigerian family. Yet it seems his life's barren of grace. With a degree from a prestigious American college and a marvelous resumé, Ike can't get the bank or corporate jobs he longs for ... due to his charming but "difficult" accent, a residue of the Old Country. Nor has he fulfilled his mother's expectations for him; he has even stopped sending money to her, and never even told her about his American marriage, which has already failed.

But Ike has plans: He's found a very, very upscale New York City gallery that sells "foreign gods" and he's going to go home to Nigeria and kidnap the one that his family tends, a wooden item that's been endowed with the spirit of the god of war: Ngene. And by selling this to the gallery, he will finally be rich and well regarded.

This isn't an art theft thriller -- it's way more complicated than that. Because Ngene really has power (as do the other "foreign gods" already at the gallery!), and Ike is clueless about the depth of trouble he's stepping into. In his struggle to achieve American success, he's tangling with Old Ways that haven't lost their power. He should have guessed his own ties to those ways, from what happens to him each time there's a storm ...

FOREIGN GODS INC follows the Donald Westlake path because it's a caper novel and involves (oh, lovely!) taxi cabs ... Saul Bellow in Henderson the Rain King comes to mind as Ike tangles with forces of nature he's forgotten about ... and the malevolence of Heart of Darkness underlies the inevitable disaster ahead, one that the reader knows is coming, long before Ike realizes what he's done to his own dreams and life. Let this be the first on your Nigerian mysteries shelf -- or shelve it next to that master of well-meant criminal disaster, Donald Westlake himself. It's a worthy companion!