Esperance

Homicide Detective Ethan Krol’s new case begins…

“With a mumbled “Good morning” to the uniform at the door, he stepped past the tape and into a neat, nicely accessorized apartment, pulling on a pair of latex gloves as he did so. The bright blue of Lake Michigan was clearly visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows. He drank the view in for a moment, steadying himself. Only then did he look down.

There were three bodies on the floor. Only two of which were human.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“It’s a barracuda. Leastways, if you believe Carter over there.”

This starts as a "locked room" mystery. A father and his infant are murdered, having been drowned in ocean water. Only problem is the scene of the crime is in a 30th floor high-rise luxury apartment _in Chicago_, so where'd the ocean water come from? (the ocean is at least 600 miles away) Also oddly, the wife is left unconscious but otherwise untouched, and the doctors say she was poisoned with an previously unknown neurotoxin. The murderer has very cleverly avoided leaving any clues (all the cameras magically malfunction in his presence) to this seemingly impossible murder.

So begins our story. A few days later in Bristol UK, Abidemi Eniola a beautiful, intimidatingly tall ebony woman, who speaks an anachronistic slang (because she is from “Nigeria”) is trying to get her bearings in unfamiliar surroundings. In a lucky break, she literally bumps into Holly Rogers, a goth street hustler, who helps Abi fence some diamonds that she needs for spending money and just like that, within a day they have formed a (platonic) team. Ebi, we soon discover is some sort of super spy with technological body enhancements that allow her to survive various violent scrapes. Yes, you guessed it, she is not from Nigeria and she is also tasked with stopping our murderer.

Ethan finds clues that the murderer has ties to Nigeria as the murderer strikes again, this time in Rhode Island, which draws Ebi to the USA and into direct conflict with the police (who as a general rule, don’t like super vigilantes on their turf.) Ebi has a dangerous encounter with Ethan and a Rhode Island colleague while failing to prevent yet another murder.

This is a well crafted suspense novel where two charming but very different detectives, pursue the same killer. The police are obviously way out of their depth as both Ebi and the murderer possess far superior technology. The story builds as the police close in on the killer… And things don’t go as planned. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but it’s worth reading. I enjoyed the characters and the gadgets.

I just read a very flawed first novel for a friend of mine and so I want to consider this the way I read her book to see why this one worked for me the way her's did not.

In the end it turns out that Abi and Yemi (the murderer) travel using inter-dimensional gates from their distant home world. Yemi is punishing the descendants of the owners of the Esperance, a slaving vessel whose crew, having run out of water while lost at sea, begins dumping their cargo of slaves in order to slow their usage of water. It happens that extraterrestrial visitors who have been observing (and recording) this horrific episode decide to save the remaining slaves from drowning/sharks. Yemi and Abi (Yemi’s daughter) are descendants of those slaves. Yemi believes that biblical style punishment (over generations of descendants) is appropriate for this (truly heinous crime). This is somewhat plausible because the rescued and resettled slaves have very long lifespans thanks to very advanced technology, thus the horror of the 300 year old drownings is still fresh. Abi has been sent to stop Yemi. It is also revealed that the drowning punishments are another use of the same inter-dimensional gate technology this time to move huge volumes of ocean water.

And at this point I thought, "Hmmm, I am not buying it. If the premise of the plot was made clear earlier in the book I probably would have stopped reading. (I mean, if your civilization has inter-dimensional gates then you have better things to do than arranging performative executions on a backwards planet.) Yet, Mr. Oyebanji did know this was the premise behind the plot and still chose to write the book. I have to say that in spite of the shade I am casting on the premise of the book, he managed, through well-paced action, well-developed, likeable characters, and well-used gadget-plot-devices to keep all the balls in the air until about the last 20 pages. And I obviously enjoyed it enough to finish it in a day and then spew this much verbiage commenting on it.