Soon enough I found myself outside the airport in what felt like a market – a wall of people shouting and heckling, selling newspapers, phone cards, even boiled eggs. But it wasn’t the people that stopped me in my tracks, it was the heat. The heat made New Orleans on a hot summer day feel like spring. Humid, thick and salty to taste, that was Nairobi heat.

When a beautiful blonde girl is found murdered on the porch of an African university professor in Maple Bluff, Madison, USA, hard-working detective Ishmael Fofona knows immediately that it will be the news event of the year. What he cannot know however is that the discovery of the dead girl will change his life forever and that barely seventy-two hours after being called to the scene he will find himself on African soil, hunting for clues in a case that seemingly makes no sense. Why would Joshua Hakizimana – a hero of the Rwandan genocide, a man who had saved hundreds of people from the machetes of the genocidaires – kill a random white girl and then dump her body outside his house? The answers, it would seem, lie in Africa. And there is only one way to get at them.        

Kenyan author Mukoma wa Ngugi’s debut novel is a gripping and hard-hitting detective thriller that questions race, identity and class.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mukoma wa Ngugi was born in Illinois and is the son of African writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He is a Political Columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine.

His essays and columns have appeared in the Guardian, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, South African Labour Bulletin, South Africa’s Mail and Guardian, Kenya’s Business Daily Africa, amongst others. He has been a guest commentator on Democracy Now and the BBC World Service. He is the author of an anthology of poetry titled Hurling Words at Consciousness (2006), as well as Conversing with Africa: Politics of Change (2003). His poems have appeared in the New York Quarterly, and in several anthologies.