A review by rosseroo
Nairobi Heat by Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ
2.0
I'm always excited to read crime stories set in other cultures, and so I picked up this Kenyan-set book with great anticipation. The story actually opens in the American college town of Madison, Wisconsin, where a beautiful young white woman has been found dead on the doorstep of a visiting Rwandan professor. A local African-American police detective named Ishmael catches the case, and is soon sucked into a whirlpool of confusion involving the legacy of the genocide in Rwanda 15 years in the past. The professor is a hero of the genocide, referred to as a kind of Rwandan Schindler (Paul Rusesabagina is purposefully not invoked), who used his school as a safe haven and waystation to smuggle people to safety. Now he is one of the public faces of a international charity devoted to supporting the victims of the genocide.
With no clues to go on, Ishmael and his chief are stuck -- until an anonymous phone call directs them to go to Nairobi to find the truth. Ishmael hops on a plane, and soon enough, is knocking around the Kenyan capital with a local police detective, stirring up trouble. As they start to look into the charity, and the center it runs, they encounter varying degrees of resistance, and meet a string of shady characters (most notable among them is a crazy rich white plantation owner), and Ishmael falls for a sexy slam poetess who helps him uncover the truth.
Unfortunately, while he book does a great job of capturing the feel of Nairobi's slums and rich enclaves, the story itself is kind of ridiculous in a lot of ways. For example, it's not very plausible from either a cost or jurisdiction perspective that a local police force would send a detective halfway around the world on the strength of an anonymous phone call. Nor is it very plausible that the professor would be as readily dismissed as a suspect as he is. It's hard to get into it without spoiling the story, but even a basic police search of a particular building would have revealed all the evidence needed to identify the culprit from the get-go. But since that would have removed the whole basis for the trip to Kenya, it's conveniently glossed over. These flaws (and a few others) make the crime element of the story feel rather amateurish.
When the story moves to Kenya, it does find itself on more solid ground, and the setting and characters feel a little more real. What doesn't work quite as well is the attempt to have Ishmael undergo a kind of racial awakening while in Africa. While on the case, he becomes more and more comfortable in the country and finds a certain serenity there that is so beguiling that he's tempted to move there. It all feels a bit thin and I wasn't convinced by it. Another element that wasn't particularly convincing was the corrupt charity that Ishmael is investigating, or rather, not that it is corrupt, but the mechanics of its corruption. The scheme that's uncovered is paper thin, and it's (again) not particularly plausible. You have to buy into the notion that the entire Board of Directors of a giant company like Shell are directly involved in the corruption. I've certainly got no love for Shell, especially given their behavior in Nigeria, but people at that level of power aren't going to get directly involved in something as transparently shady as what's the plot describes.
I love the idea of the crime novel as a vehicle for social history and social commentary, but the crime element has to be believable. In this book, it's not, and the entire book suffers as a result. I will, however, be curious to see what the author (who is the son of Kenya's most prominent writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o) comes up with for his next book.
With no clues to go on, Ishmael and his chief are stuck -- until an anonymous phone call directs them to go to Nairobi to find the truth. Ishmael hops on a plane, and soon enough, is knocking around the Kenyan capital with a local police detective, stirring up trouble. As they start to look into the charity, and the center it runs, they encounter varying degrees of resistance, and meet a string of shady characters (most notable among them is a crazy rich white plantation owner), and Ishmael falls for a sexy slam poetess who helps him uncover the truth.
Unfortunately, while he book does a great job of capturing the feel of Nairobi's slums and rich enclaves, the story itself is kind of ridiculous in a lot of ways. For example, it's not very plausible from either a cost or jurisdiction perspective that a local police force would send a detective halfway around the world on the strength of an anonymous phone call. Nor is it very plausible that the professor would be as readily dismissed as a suspect as he is. It's hard to get into it without spoiling the story, but even a basic police search of a particular building would have revealed all the evidence needed to identify the culprit from the get-go. But since that would have removed the whole basis for the trip to Kenya, it's conveniently glossed over. These flaws (and a few others) make the crime element of the story feel rather amateurish.
When the story moves to Kenya, it does find itself on more solid ground, and the setting and characters feel a little more real. What doesn't work quite as well is the attempt to have Ishmael undergo a kind of racial awakening while in Africa. While on the case, he becomes more and more comfortable in the country and finds a certain serenity there that is so beguiling that he's tempted to move there. It all feels a bit thin and I wasn't convinced by it. Another element that wasn't particularly convincing was the corrupt charity that Ishmael is investigating, or rather, not that it is corrupt, but the mechanics of its corruption. The scheme that's uncovered is paper thin, and it's (again) not particularly plausible. You have to buy into the notion that the entire Board of Directors of a giant company like Shell are directly involved in the corruption. I've certainly got no love for Shell, especially given their behavior in Nigeria, but people at that level of power aren't going to get directly involved in something as transparently shady as what's the plot describes.
I love the idea of the crime novel as a vehicle for social history and social commentary, but the crime element has to be believable. In this book, it's not, and the entire book suffers as a result. I will, however, be curious to see what the author (who is the son of Kenya's most prominent writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o) comes up with for his next book.