Richard Crompton (1)

I won my free copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway.

A flower-picker dies and Mollel, a cop from Nairobi, newly reassigned to Hell, investigates the death as his first case in his new position. His coworkers think he is a spy, sent to investigate them, and when an old friend of his from Nairobi turns up unexpectedly in the company of a woman from the International Criminal Court, it seems unlikely that Mollel will survive his new post. Meanwhile his Maasai roots are drawing at him, and he must try to reconcile his past with his current predicament.

I really enjoyed this one. I've read a lot of crime/police/mystery novels lately, and while they all have their own quirks, most are pretty similar once you get past the personality of the sleuth. Books in this genre from places other than Britain and the US are a bit more interesting sometimes, but usually still very similar to all the rest. However, Hell's Gate is set in Kenya, and while the author (and thus the sleuth/hero) understands what Western readers would expect of police and the justice system, the world within which this story takes place is a bit different. For the first few chapters it is disorientingly unclear whether there really is any actual 'rule of law' in Kenya, especially in a backwoods place like Hell (a small town near a tourist landmark called Hell's Gate). This disorientation resolves after a while, but not enough to let the reader forget where the story is taking place.

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