THE PRINCESS AND THE P.I.

The obedient daughter of a Ghanaian church leader teams up with a Maryland private eye to beat a murder charge.

Normally diffident Fiona Addai wants to exact revenge on the company that stole her late brother’s tech invention. But her attempt goes awry almost immediately as the company’s owner is murdered in her vicinity and she is caught with damning evidence. Enter Maurice Bennett, an ex-cop and current private investigator who has been haunted by an unsolved case involving Fiona’s father’s megachurch. Is Maurice bailing Fiona out to help her or to find dirt on her dad? Payne’s foray into romantic suspense starts with a high-stakes tech event and a backstory about Fiona’s family dynamics and the cultish church she has been serving. Add to it Maurice’s demons about his failure to help a young woman escape that church, plus the ugly end of his police career, and the narrative feels like it’s being pulled in several different directions. The plot gets further crowded with other characters and connections between the corporate espionage plot and the religious mafia one. Villains abound, including Fiona’s sister, her brother’s former lover, the publicist for the tech firm, a second-in-command at the church who keeps leering at Fiona, and Maurice’s ex–best friend on the force. There is also a scene at a sex party, a break-in at the tech office, a fight on a yacht, and a confrontation during a church service. The sequence and timeline of the scenes is confusing and the trail of murders, suspects, and motives hard to follow.

Erotic in parts but the suspense plot lacks narrative coherence.