White Leopard

Starred review from September 21, 2015
Fans of classic hard-boiled PI fiction will relish Guillame’s first book to be translated into English. French attorney Farah Tebessi approaches ex-cop Solo Camara, who works as a PI in Bamako, Mali, for help after her younger sister, Bahia, gets into trouble. Bahia, who’s a law student in France, was about to catch a flight for Paris from the Bamako airport when she was arrested for transporting 13 kilos of cocaine in her luggage. Since Farah believes that “buying off people is the national pastime in Mali,” she asks Solo to bribe the examining magistrate in charge of the case in exchange for dropping it. Solo agrees and succeeds in getting Bahia freed. When Bahia turns up with her throat slit in the Niger River, Farah asks Solo to find the killers and eliminate them. A former cop who served as a police adviser in Mali, Guillame delivers a tale of high-level corruption that will resonate with James Ellroy readers.

November 1, 2015
What seems a simple case for Malian PI Souleymane ( Solo ) Camara soon turns deadly. Solo, a former French cop who fled his homeland after avenging the deaths of his wife and young son, has made a new life in Mali, where he is known as White Leopard, for the color of his mixed-race skin. Hired by Farah Tebessi to get her younger sister out of prison after her arrest as a drug mule, Solo quickly accomplishes this task, but the young woman is murdered after being freed, and Farah puts out the word that Solo is after the killer. This starts a lethal cat-and-mouse game in which more murder results, and Solo is forced to rely on his status as the police commissioner's protege. With drugs at the center of the case, and with not only bullets flying but also machetes slinging and chainsaws humming, this is crime fiction as violent and hard-boiled as it gets. Guillaume, winner of literary prizes in France, is a former police officer who worked in Mali and knows that country's underground. His first mystery to be published in English is likely to win fans here, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)