Death by His Grace

June 12, 2017
Murder strikes close to home in Quartey’s disappointing fifth mystery featuring Ghanaian Chief Insp. Darko Dawson (after 2016’s Gold of Our Fathers). When Darko arrives at the scene of a double homicide, he’s shaken to discover that one of the victims is Katherine Vanderpuye, his wife Christine’s beloved cousin. Katherine was butchered with a machete, her head practically severed; her watchman, Gabriel, was also almost decapitated. Katherine was experiencing difficulty in her marriage. Her inability to conceive alienated her attorney husband, Solomon, and turned his family against her. Solomon’s relatives accused her of being a witch, and Solomon claimed that she was deliberately remaining barren and was trying to poison him. Despite Darko’s familial connection with the crime, he’s kept on the case. He diligently considers suspects besides Solomon, including the flamboyant Bishop Clem Howard-Mills, who had been counseling the unhappy couple. The solution to the whodunit is not as clever as in Quartey’s previous, more memorable books. Agent: Marly Rusoff, Marly Rusoff Literary Agency.

A fine narrator of audiobooks mostly set in America, Corey Allen sounds stilted in this latest Inspector Dawson mystery, which takes place, as usual, in Ghana. The story, which is slow to start, involves the murder of a sympathetic new bride who has not been able to produce children. Was she killed by her hidebound husband? The mother-in-law who never liked her? By some form of witchcraft, in which that mother-in-law fervently believes? These are all interesting questions that generally carry the listener over the less-than-fluid writing and the narration, which is too full of pauses between words and often seems to try too hard to echo the vocal rhythms of North Africa. A.C.S. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine