The Missing American

Internet scammers, a political assassination, a mysterious journalist, an intrepid young private investigator, and the fascinating setting of Ghana—these are just a few of the elements that drive the action in Kwei Quartey's exquisite new crime novel, THE MISSING AMERICAN (Soho, 2020).

THE MISSING AMERICAN introduces the young PI Emma Djan, a 26-year-old Ghanaian woman who, following in her father’s footsteps, longs to be a homicide detective but is instead placed in a police bureaucracy that has her investigating dull financial cases and facing sexual harassment from her superior in the Criminal Investigation Department. The latter ultimately lands her in a situation that gets her sacked from the CID—but it’s a blessing in disguise, as she is hired at a local private investigation agency where her ambitions are better fulfilled and her talents respected.

Emma Djan is almost immediately drawn into the investigation of a missing American man, Gordon Tilson, who arrived in Ghana in hopes of meeting a beautiful woman he met online. That woman turns out to be a fraud run by one of Ghana’s infamous sakawa boys, a ring of criminal who combine cybercrimes with “traditional” rituals that allegedly enhance their power to swindle unsuspecting foreigners.

The bewildering details and rituals of sakawa are vividly rendered by Quartey in his unique and at times hypnotic prose. Where other authors may have glossed over some of these details, Quartey spares us none, which allows the reader a much richer understanding of what is at stake. 

An apparent bust of sakawa boys in Ghana
in a typical staged police photo

We meet several of the sakawa boys and the fetish priest, Kewku Ponsu, from whom they seek their supernatural enablement and around whom they revolve. Ponsu is but one of the memorable characters in THE MISSING AMERICAN.

One of the most enigmatic characters is a powerful investigative journalist, Sana Sana, whose reports reveal the perpetrators of crimes and corruption at the highest levels. With so much on the line, Sana Sana fiercely guards his anonymity, veils himself behind a curtain of beads when meeting with people and undertakes a plethora of security measures before going anywhere. His investigation into sakawa means his path intersects with everyone from Gordon Tilson to Emma Djan.

This is a long novel that is rewarding on a number of levels. The Ghanaian setting will be unfamiliar to most readers, but Quartey is a gifted guide through its sights, smells, and tastes. His rendering of the places, ethnic groups, and even dialects and pidgin English is expert. There are many crimes in the book, not just the internet scams, but of course murder, too. (We know from the title that someone goes missing.) The criminal elements are not much of a shock or surprise; but, like a great work of detection, they are presented and solved alongside the progress Emma Djan makes as the plot unfolds. The suspenseful pulse of the book is derived from the many elements of the plot and subplots that require satisfying resolutions--and Quartey, better than most writers, delivers in tying them up.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas -- the
real-life Sana Sana?

Quartey brings alive a corner of Africa by mining realistic details of life and crime in contemporary Ghana and weaving them into a compelling and entertaining narrative. The sakawa boys present a huge challenge in global cybercrime, but also in local politics. Sana Sana appears be based on a real investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who maintains his anonymity almost identically to the way Quartey describes his fictional counterpart. The Ghanaian locations, cities, landmarks, foods, slang are all credibly portrayed and thereby lend the most enjoyable details to this delicious and spellbinding novel.

Hard Cash Valley

The action is intense, gritty, and recurrent in HARD CASH VALLEY, the third crime novel from Brian Panowich (Minotaur, 2020). It’s the story of Dane Kirby, a fire chief turned consultant to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Kirby is sent to Florida to help the Feds investigate the fallout from a brutal murder associated with the victim’s alleged swindling of prize money from the Slasher—the biggest (underground) cockfight in the USA. The Slasher took place at the Farm in Dane’s home turf of McFalls County, which is familiar territory for readers of Panowich’s previous two novels, BULL MOUNTAIN and LIKE LIONS.

Early in the investigation, Kirby is teamed with a hard-nosed FBI agent named Roselita Velasquez and the duo learns that the victim’s younger brother is hiding out somewhere in Georgia. Finding and protecting the boy, who has Asperger syndrome, becomes a driving force that leads Kirby and Velasquez down some harrowing paths in the north Georgia mountains.

The search for the boy follows a trail that becomes increasingly scattered with the bodies of anyone involved in the international cockfighting ring, and Dane Kirby—with his intimate knowledge of the landscape and the players of McFalls County, and a motivation to find and protect the boy—is essential to guiding the investigation while tussling with federal and local law enforcement along the way.

Dane Kirby’s motivation runs much deeper than achieving the satisfaction of a rescue operation. An event in his past—not revealed until near the novel’s end—haunts his existence and drives his energy, and it constitutes a powerful secondary storyline. The profound psychological heaves of love and loss inform nearly every decision Dane makes; those yearnings make him at once more courageous and more fragile. He’s a man trying to live in the physical reality of his world, but the spiritual realms seem, at times, to inhibit his ability to make meaning out of anything.

Panowich’s prose is graceful and addictive. His characters, no matter how minor to the plot are memorable from their first entrance on the page. Take James Edwin, the key holder for Black Mountain Safari Zoo. "The obese man in sweatpants and house shoes fumbled around in the large pocket of his canvas jacket the way a woman would rifle through the insides of a purse until he pulled out a set of keys... ." This is a character you can instantly see in your mind’s eye. 

The emotional undercurrents of HARD CASH VALLEY are often wrenching but never melodramatic. This is a deeply affecting and entertaining crime story that rewards the reader with both a memorable payoff to the mystery elements of the plot and a moving conclusion to Dane Kirby’s journey of the soul.

Nothing More Dangerous

Bicentennial celebrations are on most Americans’ minds in 1976, but for the residents of small town Jessup, Missouri, it’s going to be a long hot summer in NOTHING MORE DANGEROUS, Allen Eskens’s bracing new novel (Mulholland, 2019).

Ah, Missouri. Despite its two major metropolitan areas, the state is profoundly rural, one of those “between” parts of the country that straddles the American heartland and whose people embrace sociocultural aspects of the west, the south and the midwest. This makes it a perfect setting for murder—and for exploring the web of relationships among the townspeople, and the oblique forms of racism, prejudice and sexism that perpetually bubble just below the surface and burst over at contentious moments.

Boady Sanden, fifteen years old, is the hero of the novel. He lives with his widowed mother and is the odd man out at the local private school; he dreams of the day he can escape Jessup for the big city. And then one day, the bookkeeper of the plastics factory—the town’s biggest employer—disappears with a bunch of money. This sets in motion a series of events that turns the town, but most importantly Boady’s life, upside down.

Charles Elgin, from the company’s headquarters in Minnesota, is dispatched to Missouri to oversee the plastics plant and find out what happened to the missing money. Charles, his wife, and his teenage son, Thomas, move in across the street from Boady and his mom and their neighbor, Hoke. The Elgins, though, are different from the other folks. They’re from cosmopolitan and progressive Minnesota, and they also happen to be black, in contrast to deeply white and rural Jessup.

Thomas and Boady develop a fast friendship that tests the historical yoke of in-group loyalty that the other Jessup teens have harnessed onto Boady. And, as cruel manifestations of prejudice by some white extremists in the town become progressively violent, Boady has to become more engaged in his hometown than he would have ever imagined, while mustering the gumption that is foreshadowed in the opening scene of the novel.

Allen Eskens has honed his skills in five previous novels (THE LIFE WE BURY) and in NOTHING MORE DANGEROUS, written a story so absorbing and characters so real that the payoffs feel much more substantial than they otherwise might in a nonseries novel. Eskens takes some risks for a crime novel. The book starts with a slow burn, and there’s no body until about page 139. Some of the surprising twists—and there are plenty—have less to do with the central crime itself, and much more to do with resolving multiple strands of tension and action that have built up over the course of the novel.

NOTHING MORE DANGEROUS is a coming-of-age novel in the best sense. Eskens vividly evokes the ethos of boyhood in the character of Boady, and he does it particularly well by plumbing the teenager’s hopes and fears: from Boady’s daydreaming to his plan for escaping Jessup, to his fears of what length a school bully would go to exact revenge. The novel is written in first-person singular, in Boady’s voice, which is not the easiest technique for this story even though it is clearly the correct choice.

There are a few places early in the book where it appears that Eskens will moralize or preach (given the heady thematic underpinnings of the plot, one could see why), but fortunately, he does not. Instead, Eskens sets the scene thoroughly and takes his time putting flesh on the characters. The payoff is that by the time the pace increases, the reader is totally invested in the characters. The last third of the novel is utterly propulsive, and I consumed the final hundred pages in a white heat of page turning.

A lot happens in the lives of Jessup, Missouri during the summer of ’76. Some things wonderful and some things folks would rather forget. “But memories aren’t like photographs; they can’t halt the passing of time. Instead, they lay like footsteps along a path, each determined by the step that came before and colored by the ones to follow” (pp. 243-244).

Murder is Binding

Lorna Barrett (the nom de plume of writer Lorraine Bartlett) has written an excellent first mystery novel in Murder is Binding (Berkley Prime Crime, 2008). The setting is the small town of Stoneham, New Hampshire, where local developer Bob Kelly has leased downtown property to a series of small bookshop owners (each shop focuses on a particular genre, like cookbooks, mystery, history, etc.). Tricia Miles, the owner of mystery bookshop Haven't Got a Clue, is the lead character in this story and in the series.

When the owner of Tricia's neighboring store, Doris Gleason of The Cookery, turns up dead, Tricia is left to sort out the mess in order to provide peace of mind not only for herself, but for the tranquil Stoneham. Tricia's sister, Angelica breezes into town for what turns out to be more than just a short visit, and ends up helping Tricia solve the murder. What's more, the sheriff is intent to pin the Doris's murder on Tricia. The "cozy" meter registers pretty high here: small, idyllic town (more like paradise... a town full of bookstores!); Tricia lives above her bookshop; Angelica is a gourmet cook; a meddling sheriff; and more.

Lorna Barrett is a mystery writer of great talent. I especially appreciated the way she brought the retail environment of Haven't Got a Clue to life, a venue I suspect that will provide endless opportunities for future plots (Susan Wittig Albert has used China Bayles's herb business in this way for upwards of 17 books!). Barrett is also part of a new generation of cozy writers who have endowed their characters with complicated social relationships. The subplot of familial fractures in the sister-bond between Tricia and Angelica will offer many opportunities to really understand the motivation for these characters in future novels, as it did in Binding. She also touched on the generational problems we all will face in the characters of Mr. Everett, Grace and Doris Gleason (I won't spoil the plot by giving details!). At the end of the book, I was also left wondering if Mr. Everett and Grace have a future together?

There are other themes Ms. Barrett may pursue, such as community development and the arrival of "big box" stores in small towns (a theme also present in Sheila Connolly's One Bad Apple, a cozy set in neighboring Massachusetts). I'm also looking forward to the development of Angelica's relocation to Stoneham, and how that affects her relationship with Tricia (and her business).

My only quarrel is with the character of Sheriff Wendy Adams, whose motivation was somewhat difficult to believe. If Adams is to be Tricia's foil throughout the series, we will need to learn much more about her and her background. I realize this is not a police procedural, but it seems that any sheriff (even in a small town) would want to give the aesthetic of a proper investigation. This is not a major criticism and certainly does not detract from the many enjoyments of the novel. Personally I didn't find any redeeming quality in Adams, and I'd like to see her knocked off (or moved away) soon, but I am only a reader and it is always up to the author to populate the universe they create.

The action toward the last third of the book was downright suspenseful, and the climactic scene (in the bookshop of course) is much more realistic than one typically finds in a cozy mystery. I applaud Ms. Barrett's first outing and look forward to the next installments.

Asking for Murder

The third and perhaps final installment in Roberta Isleib's Advice Column mystery series, Asking for Murder (Berkley Prime Crime, 2008), is a very fine testament to the pleasures of familiarity one gains from returning to a solid series. It's always a treat when one of your new favorite authors hits one out of the park. And here, I'm happy to report, Isleib's penned another winner.

Inherent in the etymology of familiarity is the idea of family--and certainly Dr. Rebecca Butterman and the other characters of coastal Connecticut that populate these novels have come to represent a kind of "literary family." Luckily, even readers who enter the series with this book will find uncommon familiarity since Ms. Isleib does an effortless job of evoking characters, settings and ambiance for the uninitiated. But what makes such family/familiarity pleasurable in Asking for Murder?

1. Isleib has described and immersed us in an environment so real that we only need sketches of description--a busy highway, the hunger pains of a busy professional, a rainy day, the wall decor in a psychologist's office--to bring us into the story. These sketches are the touchstones of another world that help us imagine what it would be like to live/work/play/eat/love there. We jump from touchstone to touchstone, like boulders in a wide river, over the arc of the narrative. And in the context of the novel we are free to imagine the spaces between the rocks upon which the story is built.
   
2. We have such a good understanding of our protagonist, Rebecca Butterman that we can begin to anticipate (but not necessarily predict, and this is a fine distinction) how she will react in given circumstances. The art of this fiction, though, is that Rebecca is not merely a pawn run through the maze of a story. She is fundamentally changed by her experience. In Asking for Murder she must learn about a novel type of psychological therapy (sandplay or sand tray therapy, influenced by Carl Jung's emphasis on the subconscious). The reader learns along with Rebecca how this fascinating therapy works. And, Rebecca is always working out her emotional experience through the exercise of writing her advice column.
   
3. The supporting cast of characters are integral to the story. Rebecca's psychologist friend, Annabelle Hart, is found badly beaten at the beginning of the story and this is the driving mystery throughout the book: Who would beat Dr. Hart within an inch of her life? As Rebecca attempts to answer that question, she must confront not only Annabelle's family and friends but also her league of patients. No one is free of suspicion. Meanwhile the first (and only) dead body doesn't turn up until more than halfway through. How interesting!
   
4. The premise of the story is believable. Because both Dr. Butterman and Dr. Hart are clinical psychologists, we can easily believe that they would frequently be in contact with all manner of "strange" individuals--even ones in their own families. Beyond the premise, there are enough day-to-day happenings in Rebecca's life that we can easily imagine her as we might our friends or ourselves... sleeping, cooking, eating, meeting people, playing with pets, following up on responsibilities, etc.
   
5. There are important questions in Rebecca's life that remain unanswered. Since these involve her personal relationships and have little bearing on the solution to the central mystery of this book, the reader is not disappointed that they remain unanswered. Rather, this reader is anxious to find out what happens between Rebecca and Detective Meigs. And what develops between Rebecca and her estranged father? How does her sister, Janice ultimately react? Will Rebecca ever resolve her ambivalent feelings about Mark?

I was more than a little sad to close the final chapter in this book knowing there was not another one waiting. I recently read an online interview with Ms. Isleib wherein she mentioned there were no immediate plans for any more books in this series and that she was at work on a stand-alone novel. It would be a darn shame for mystery lovers if this is Dr. Rebecca Butterman's swan song, but given its fine writing and satisfying resolution, Asking for Murder would not be a disastrous coda to a very confident and well-written mystery series.

Preaching to the Corpse

The second book in Roberta Isleib's Advice Column Mystery series, Preaching to the Corpse (Berkley Prime Crime, 2007) does everything a second book in a series should do. I always look for four general developments in a series' installments, and if I find them in multiple books, I know I've found an author I like. Rather than summarize the plot (which you can easily look up on Google, just like Rebecca Butterman!), for this review I will outline the general criteria I look for in an ongoing series and then discuss how it relates to Preaching to the Corpse.

A. Development of the main character. In the series, Dr. Rebecca Butterman is the protagonist: a newly-divorced, smart and self-starting psychologist in Guilford, Connecticut. She's in private practice and teaches part-time at Yale, and she moonlights as an advice columnist ("Ask Dr. Aster") for a popular online magazine. Preaching, while it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone, develops Rebecca into a three-dimensional character first introduced in Deadly Advice. She is asked to take over the search committee for an interim pastor at the Shoreline Congregational Church after the mysterious death of its former chair, Lacy Bailes. She juggles her relationship with her sister, Janice, after deciding to track down their estranged father. She's forced to manage her ambivalent feelings for the married Detective Meigs as their relationship takes turns both tender and coy.

Rebecca shows some more vulnerabilities in this book which makes her more "real." She's a person we'd like to know and be neighbors with, to work with or share an office. She also seems to care less and less about writing her advice column. This does have the effect of making at least this reader a little less interested in the advice column, too. The author, Roberta Isleib is a psychologist herself, and she actually dispenses some very useful advice in the narrative passages of the book which careful readers will pick up on (wise ones will employ it!). Butterman is such a vivid character, and it occurred to me while reading that just being a psychologist is enough for Rebecca The series is strong enough to stand without the periodic (albeit less frequent) "Dear Dr. Aster" letters. Whereas in Deadly Advice the column provided motivation and motion for the action, here it feels not exactly ornamental but rather another task on Rebecca's already-full plate.

B. Development of the setting and environment. The small towns of New England, particularly the Connecticut shoreline, come alive in Preaching. It's winter so the roads are icy and snow is falling; the characters nurse colds and ailments; food is warm and appropriate to the season, and so forth. We have church potlucks, Christmas cookies, warmed-up soup and even a tea party. I am particularly drawn to the condominium complex setting: this is a very unique and "cozy" choice for Rebecca's home, and Isleib does a great job of evoking how it must feel to live there and the way that works into her character's life. That this setting is neither quaint nor idyllic but just plain old realistic has turned out to be part of Rebecca's identity and one of the strongest suits of the series.

C. A strong supporting cast with characters old and new. The best series writers have a set of characters that alternately emerge or play more of a background role depending on their role in the plot of the book. Recurring characters are helpful because they make us feel comfortable in the environment, and they tell us much about the protagonist (who they have some sort of relationship with). Preaching's main recurring supporting character is Detective Meigs, who this time is a little more willing (albeit begrudgingly) to suffer Rebecca's amateur sleuthing into the circumstances surrounding Lacy Bailes's death. We also encounter some of the condo residents again, and Rebecca's sister, but they have background role. There are many new characters, too, almost all associated with the Church in some way, but because Isleib ties up this puzzle so well it is doubtful we will (need) to see many of those folks again (but these are small towns, so we may).

D. A widening and deepening complexity. This is probably true of all of the above categories, but I separate it because it is the overall feeling I expect to have when I've finished the novel. I can begin to answer anthropological questions (with greater certainty) like: How do these characters assign meaning to their lives? Why do they make the choices they do? What kinds of food do they eat? How do they interact with people? What sorts of things are important to them, and why? If you can answer questions like those about the characters in a novel, you know the author is keeping up their end of the author-reader contract--and for that matter, so are you!

This very strong second installment is another great read from Isleib. Readers will be particularly pleased with the resolution, I think, as the perp is not someone I expected at all (I really want to say more about this but I can't because I don't want to commit a cardinal sin and drop any hints!!). There are many intriguing plot points about inner-church politics (even one with echoes of New Hampshire's Bishop Gene Robinson controversy). The writing is tight, the plot believable and I recommend this book.

Deadly Advice

With Deadly Advice (Berkley Prime Crime, 2007), Roberta Isleib has introduced one of the best mystery series to appear since Susan Wittig Albert introduced the China Bayles series in the early 1990s. We can only hope that Isleib's series will run as long as Albert's (currently in its 17th installment).

Deadly Advice introduces Dr. Rebecca Butterman, a Guilford, Connecticut psychologist who sees clients in private practice, moonlights at Yale, and writes a pseudonymous relationship advice column, "Ask Dr. Aster." Newly divorced, Butterman has bought a townhouse condominium in an association full of singles and retirees. It is quite a cozy environment with all the requisite characters (the handyman, the nosy neighbor, the widows, single professionals, etc.), until 34-year-old Madeline Stanton--Dr. Butterman's neighbor--turns up dead in her bathtub of an apparent suicide. Butterman, unnerved by the prospect that such a horrible thing could happen on the other side of the wall shared by their respective units, begins to suspect that Madeline's death may not have been a suicide. Madeline's mother, Isabel, thinks the same thing, and persuades Dr. Butterman to do some amateur sleuthing to uncover the real truth. Madeline may not have been the person her family, or neighbors, thought she was...

Isleib works in the Ask Dr. Aster column angle quite skillfully, so that the subject of the columns mirrors the current preoccupations of Dr. Butterman (the singles dating scene, relationships between children and parents, etc.). We also learn more about Dr. Butterman's life through the various interactions she has with her best friends Angie and Annabelle; her neighbors; her sister, Janice; and various clients and colleagues. There is also an intriguing male police detective, Meigs, who we are sure to meet in subsequent books. Readers will also appreciate Isleib's informative, but never preachy, insights into the human psyche. The many unexpected twists and cliffhangers keep the pages turning quickly, and there are enough red herring suspects for a fiendish fish market.

Deadly Advice unequivocally marks the debut of a major series by an extremely talented and inventive author. Butterman is a real character, confident and vulnerable but likeable. We'll want to get to know her more. Isleib's writing is so smooth is goes down like a fine blended Scotch; the last drop isn't quite enough and it leaves us wanting another round.

Ding Dong Dead

Ding Dong Dead is the fourth installment of the "Dolls to Die For" series by author Deb Baker. It's also the first one in the series that I've read. Like many readers, I don't necessarily like to start series from the beginning because I'm impatient, since most reviews cover the current title and it is inevitable that I've been hooked in by the particular storyline that is mentioned in the reviews. Of course, if the book is good, I'll delve backward into the earlier titles.

That will certainly be the case with Deb Baker, who has crafted a quickly-paced mystery that is both suspenseful and interesting. The premise is that a group of doll collectors in Phoenix--led by the protagonist, Gretchen Birch and her mother, Caroline--is gifted the use of a large mansion to use for a museum. To raise money for its opening and upkeep, they decide to produce a stage play called "Ding Dong Dead." Meanwhile, Gretchen's newish boyfriend, Matt--a Phoenix police detective--is called to a murder scene at the local cemetery. Gretchen and her mother become involved in the investigation of that murder and their sleuthing takes them deep into the troubled history of the long-deceased original owners of the mansion that has been granted to their club to establish the "World of Dolls Museum."

Don't be fooled by the doll theme--Baker does a great job of making dolls work for the suspenseful mystery puzzle that drives the action and thus the story, rather than the other way around. This is a serious mystery with a large cast and several complex plot points. The natural eeriness of dolls, their inherent personification that makes people pause, is reflected in the character of Matt. Yet do not think this is a Chucky-esque, "demonic dolls" sort of series. It's not.

The body count is 2, but there are many other potential victims with near-escapes, and you won't know who the killer is (or their motives) until almost the very end. There are also subplots on mental health and homelessness that Baker works into the narrative with a gentle nod but no preaching, and it was surprising and nice to find these in a contemporary mystery--and handled with great respect and expertise. I will be interested to see what happens to Gretchen and Matt in the next installment!