Children of the Street

Quartey convincingly portrays the seedy underbelly of Accra, Ghana's capital city, in his second novel starring Det. Insp. Darko Dawson (after Wife of the Gods). The well-rounded Dawson, a homicide investigator, struggles with his taste for marijuana as well as the politics of his job. To compound his problems, his beloved seven-year-old son, Hosiah, is in desperate need of surgery, to repair a hole in his heart, that Dawson can't afford. Notwithstanding all these pressures, Dawson plunges into the search for a serial killer targeting young street children, who are stabbed and mutilated in accordance with some savage ritual. He consults the country's leading expert on ritual murder, a man with secrets of his own to conceal. Quartey cleverly hides the culprit, but the whodunit's strength is as much in the depiction of a world largely unfamiliar to an American readership as in its playing fair. (July)