Easy Motion Tourist

April 24, 2017
Set in Lagos, this roller-coaster ride of a thriller from Nigerian short story writer Adenle offers an abundance of characters, ubiquitous corruption and violence, and several graphic scenes of torture. Guy Collins, a clueless hack journalist from England, has come to Lagos to write about an upcoming election. He makes the mistake of going to a club for a drink and later stepping outside where the mutilated body of a young woman has been deposited. The police arrest Guy after questioning him at the scene, though it’s unclear why they do so, since no evidence links him to the crime. To his surprise, he’s rescued from jail by Amaka, a beautiful woman who has become a respected advocate for prostitutes. Assuming he’s well connected, Amaka wants Guy to write an expose of the dirty world she inhabits. Eventually, the pair get on the trail of the young woman’s killer. While not for every taste, this relentlessly paced tale of people at cross-purposes and uncertain loyalties provides a searing look at how power corrupts.

May 15, 2017
Nigerian writer Adenle delivers a horrifyingly absorbing thriller set in contemporary Lagos. The somewhat naive, first-person narrator, Guy Collins, a newbie British journalist at an Internet start-up, sends himself to Lagos to cover the election. Collins might be a nod to the famously in-over-his head journalist hero of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop; that the horrors Collins encounters are witnessed by an outsider makes them even more shocking for the reader. The novel's prologue sets up how easily women, even sheltered university students, can slip into prostitution and then entrapment in a larger criminal operation. Collins' visit to a Lagos bar at night leads both to a meeting with a savvy woman on a campaign to free the working girls and to his discovery of the mutilated body of a young woman in the gutter outside the bar. Adenle uses Collins (who, in turn, is used by the prostitutes' self-appointed guardian) to open up the secret world of sex trafficking, witchcraft, and the trade of body parts, all of which depend on the exploitation of young women. This African noir debut novel hits hard.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)