The latest in Akashic’s long-running series runs the gamut in style, introducing a generous assortment of new writers.
Fourteen new crime stories set in Kenya’s capital and largest city.
The teeming diversity of Nairobi, a metropolis of more than 3 million people, is reflected in this anthology, illustrated by a map of the city that shows a different neighborhood location for each story, the neighborhood’s name mischievously overlaying the white silhouette of a corpse. The highlights are as diverse as the city itself. In Winfred Kiunga’s “She Dug Two Graves,” a young woman with a bright future sets out with a vengeance to solve the devastating murder of her brother. Faith Oneya’s “Say You Are Not My Son” traces the bizarre aftermath of the “sewer volcano” that erupts in a squalid neighborhood. Rasna Warah chronicles the psychiatric visits of a distressed United Nations worker in the twisty “Have Another Roti.” Music figures prominently in several of the stories: “The Hermit in the Helmet,” by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, features many hymns in its saga of an educated man driven to irrational extremes by the perceived power of the title headgear. J.E. Sibi-Okumu deconstructs the anatomy of a robbery in piercing detail in “Belonging.” The collection ends with the most traditionally noir story, Ngumi Kibera’s “The Night Beat,” a gritty procedural centering on military police. There are also stories by Kevin Mwachiro, Kinyanjui Kombani, Troy Onyango, Makena Onjerika, Peter Kimani, Wanjikũ wa Ngũgĩ, Caroline Mose, and Stanley Gazemba.
The latest in Akashic’s long-running series runs the gamut in style, introducing a generous assortment of new writers.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61775-754-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Plotted and peopled with unstinting generosity, even if the regulars are never quite as amusing as the author thinks.
Superintendent Richard Jury’s 25th case is less a star turn than a team effort for a trio of detectives and their deep bench of helpers and hangers-on.
A pair of young sisters out walking the beach of Bryher, the smallest inhabited Isle of Scilly off the Cornish coast, find the body of a woman who’s been shot to death. Since Bryher is accessible only by ferry, it stands to reason that whoever killed Manon Vinet is still on the island. That’s hard for the close-knit native community to accept. What makes the case even harder for Divisional Commander Brian Macalvie, called in from Exeter to head the investigation, is that the victim’s most prominent link to the outside world—the fact that she once nursed the late Gerald Summerston—links her to still more violence when Summerston’s niece, Flora Flood, is arrested for fatally shooting her estranged husband, Tony Servino. Flora denies the charges, but her account—Tony threatened her because he was enraged at being served with divorce papers after a two-year separation; she only shot at his feet; an intruder entering at just that moment fired the fatal bullet from a gun of the same caliber—seems calculated to inspire skepticism from even her next-door neighbor Jury’s old friend Melrose Plant. While Jury and Sir Thomas Brownell, a legendary detective retired from Scotland Yard, are still trying to figure out whether the two murders are connected, their attention is claimed by a third: the shooting of former Summerston maid Moira Quinn in Exeter Cathedral, right on Macalvie’s home turf. The ensuing rounds of inquiry and cross-checking would tax most novelists and their detectives to the limit, but Grimes (The Knowledge, 2018, etc.) keeps dropping unexpected complications, newly minted characters, and familiar faces into a mix that becomes so head-spinning that most readers are likely to greet the denouement with a combination of surprise and relief.
Plotted and peopled with unstinting generosity, even if the regulars are never quite as amusing as the author thinks.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4740-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Prime candidate for a TV movie.
A romance/investigation debut novel set firmly in the spiritual aftermath of WWI.
Maisie Dobbs, recently turned private investigator in 1929 England, had been a nurse back during the war to end all wars, so she knows about wounds—both those to the body and those to the soul. It’s just a month after she sets up shop that she gets her first interesting case: What initially looks like just another infidelity matter turns out to be a woman’s preoccupation with a dead man, Vincent Weathershaw, in a graveyard. Flashback to Maisie’s upbringing: her transition from servant class to the intellectual class when she shows interest in the works of Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung. She doesn’t really get to explore her girlhood until she makes some roughshod friends in the all-woman ambulance corps that serves in France, and she of course falls for a soldier, Simon, who writes her letters but then disappears. Now, in 1929, Maisie’s investigation into Vincent Weathershaw leads her to the mysterious Retreat, run like a mix between a barracks and a monastery, where soldiers still traumatized by the war go to recover. Maisie knows that her curiosity just might get her into trouble—yet she trusts her instincts and sends an undercover assistant into the Retreat in the hopes of finding out more about Vincent. But what will happen, she worries, if one needs to retreat from the Retreat? Will she discover the mystery behind her client’s wife’s preoccupation with a man who spent time there? And by any chance, albeit slight, might she encounter that old lover who disappeared back in 1917 and who she worried might be dead? Winspear rarely attempts to elevate her prose past the common romance, and what might have been a journey through a strata of England between the wars is instead just simple, convenient and contrived.
Prime candidate for a TV movie.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-330-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
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