The Boy Who Stole the Leopard's Spots

April 2, 2012
A weak story line hobbles Myers’s third mystery set in 1950s Belgian Congo (after 2011’s The Headhunter’s Daughter), though the author makes good use of her personal knowledge of the country, where she grew up. The action alternates between 1935, when two children prepare to practice “the ancient custom of cannibalism,” and 1958, where the police chief of Belle Vue, Pierre Jardin, has a murder to solve. That killing follows a dispute between Lazarus Chigger Mite and Jonathan Pimple, two villagers, about the ownership of a goat that belonged to Pimple before it was swallowed by a python killed by Mite. Myers signals how past and present intersect early on, eliminating some of the surprise impact. Efforts to inject farce into the drama don’t always succeed, and Kwei Quartey and others have better portrayed the collision of superstition and modernity. Agent: Nancy Yost, Nancy Yost Literary Agency.

May 1, 2012
The Belgian Congo of 1958, facing enormous social changes as colonial rule is nearing an end, is challenged by more intimate disruption. The denizens of the lovely town of Belle Vue are separated by a chasm even deeper than the river crossed by a bridge that connects the whites on one side to the natives on the other. But there are other crossings, some peaceful, some not. Protestant missionary Amanda Brown's servant Cripple is a heathen, a wise, self-educated woman married to a failed witch doctor. The stunning town sexpot, Congo-born Madame Cabochon, whose spouse is a sot, looks with dismay on the mutual attraction between Amanda and police chief Capt. Pierre Jardin. Into this mix of competing religions and wide class differences comes Monsignor Clemente, a Rome-based priest and childhood friend of Madame Cabochon. Clemente harbors a secret rooted in his time in the Congo as a young priest in the 1930s. The narrative switches back and forth between the present and the past, when twins are born to a powerful chief. Ordinarily twins would be killed, but the chief manages to save them, only to have one molested by a white man. The cure for that outrage is to have all the tribe, and the priest's companion, share in eating the offender. Then the twins are torn apart by a kidnapping, and when they secretly reunite in Belle Vue, one is found dead, and the sins of the past afflict a town already poised for disaster. This third in the series (The Headhunter's Daughter, 2011, etc.), based on Myers' life as the child of missionaries in the Belgian Congo, is not a mystery in the traditional sense. But it provides a fascinating look at life in a colonial Africa on the brink of catastrophic change as the wily Cripple manipulates her self-anointed betters.

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May 1, 2012
Myers' searing mystery moves back and forth between the Belgian Congo in 1927 and 1935, when colonialism was at its height, and 1958, just before the Congo, 80 times the size of its longtime ruler, gained its independence. Myers, who grew up in the Congo, has a great store of knowledge about the country's natural beauty, privations, and tensions that would be impossible for an outsider to gain, or mimic. As with the other books in this series, Myers depicts the fraying relations between the Congolese and the Belgians and also between the predominantly Roman Catholic missionaries and the Protestant missionaries. The murder that drives the plot (an especially creepy one tied to ritual) dates back to 1935 but is roiling the already-tense community of Belle Vue. The main character, Amanda, a young and unsure American missionary, has to deal with a house staff on the verge of mutiny or worse. Edge-of-your-seat tragicomedy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)