Refreshing wakeup call
West African writer shines a bright light on seedy underbelly

by Jeffrey Mannix
The pursuit of crime novels to feature in Murder Ink has always been off-road, stealthy and disobedient to the seductions of conglomerate publishing imprints that have film offers in their back pockets and roads paved in gold to entice them.
“Follow the money” is the direction publishers and all businesses stray toward, notwithstanding their mission statements and visions of their rectitude.
I don’t mean to disparage the big publishing houses, many or most of the brand names pay big advances to their marquee authors who predictably deliver popular, marketable stories year after year.
I haven’t heard the disparagement “airport novel” in years, but if you spend inevitable waiting time in an airport and peruse the newsstand, you’ll see the embossed and overdesigned dust covers luring you into the getaway you’re waiting hours to endure while crammed into an 18-inch seat.
And in the 20-some years I’ve been searching for genuine highbrow crime fiction – mostly offshore and from small domestic presses – all of the big New York publishers have ferreted out or shoplifted some very good writers.
Or, very good fiction writers have been eager to try their hand at mysteries as they see the genre grow exponentially with advances and royalties nearly assured.
West African countries (Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, etc.) have begun to produce some very fine crime fiction over the past decade, and you will want to pay particular attention to “Last Seen in Lapaz” by retired Ghanan physician Kwei Quartey. It was released a month ago in hardcover and eBook by the dedicated small crime imprint Soho Press in New York.
“Last Seen in Lapaz” introduces a rather bookish and audacious Emma Djan, an investigator for a successful private investigation agency in Accra, Ghana. She is assigned to find the whereabouts of the 18-year-old daughter of a retired Nigerian ambassador, Nnamdi Ojukwu, who is a longtime friend of Sowah Private Investigators Agency’s owner, Yemo Sowah.
The daughter, Ngozi, was destined for law school before she became despondent and withdrawn over her parents’ disapproval of a boyfriend, Femi Adebanjo.
Ten years her senior, he was seen as smarmy and boldly distrustful by her parents. And now Ngozi has disappeared, and Ambassador Ojukwu suspects foul play and is paying handsomely to have Emma find her.
Femi, the boyfriend, is discovered in Accra with a bullet in his head and Ngozi nowhere to be found. They indeed ran away together, and Femi convinced an inexperienced Ngozi to train indentured runaways to be sex workers at the White House Hotel he managed. There, the young women were held captive until they earned enough to be smuggled out of Nigeria with hopes of better lives in Italy.
Now, with Femi dead and Ngozi missing, the countdown to finding Ngozi alive is growing shorter and more dire by the hour.
Quartey is an accomplished novelist who creates real characters and puts them in clever and palpable circumstances.
Quartey shines a bright light on the West African culture of smuggling, bribes, and renegade government and law enforcement. He does it with such easy nonchalance that we live the lives of his characters, hear the West African pidgin dialect and recoil with every trap Quartey sets for his characters.
I’m excited to have discovered Kwei Quartey, and I found myself reading late into the night and at stop lights and at lunch, or, more likely, instead of lunch.
At a respectful 300 pages, “Last Seen in Lapaz” is a refreshing wakeup during a sleepy winter of maintenance publishing.
With “Last Seen in Lapaz,” Murder Ink will help get you through this icy winter and add delight to spring and much excitement to summer with a lineup of extraordinary crime fiction books held back by Covid.
Skip lunch out and use what you would have spent to invest the savings in Quartey’s new book.
And don’t forget to ask our partners at Maria’s Bookshop for your Murder Ink 15% discount.
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