ACCRA NOIR
her of having had an affair with Brady, she becomes the prime suspect. Although the bridal party was visiting the salon when the scissors vanished, the evidence piling up against Selene forces Athena to investigate. At the same time, Athena’s working out relationship problems with handsome, astute Case Donnelly, whom she saved from a murder rap in her debut, Statue of Limitations (2020). Although Case has recently moved to Michigan, Athena, who has trust issues, isn’t sure if that was for her or for some other reason. But she’s glad he’s willing to pitch in to help her save Selene. Now they just have to find someone who was fed up with Brady’s playboy habits. Mean girls, stalkers, and a jealous brother are all fair game as suspects in this clever and amusing mystery.
ed. by Danquah, Nana-Ama Akashic (256 pp.) $15.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2020 978-1-61775-889-8 Thirteen tales of the trouble people find in the capital city of Ghana when they’re trying to make a buck. “For them it was about the hustle,” Patrick Smith writes about the Labone Choirboys, grifters trying to get a lawyer involved in a billion-dollar scam in “The Situation.” But even those on the margins have their hustles. A kaya girl who carries shoppers’ bundles in the marketplace in Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond’s “Chop Money” tries to make a bit on the side by subletting her rented room. The shop girl in Anna Bossman’s “Instant Justice” hopes to find her way out of poverty through her relationship with an older man. Kofi Blankson Ocansey tells the tale of a woman who parlays her relationships into an assortment of consumer goods in “Fanta sia in Fans and Flat Screens.” Loss of innocence is sometimes the price of economic mobility. Billie McTernan’s “The Labadi Sunshine Bar” follows a girl from the country into the sex trade. A young woman earns her keep as a drug mule in Adjoa Twum’s “Shape-Shifters.” Not all the disillusioned are young. Ayesha Harruna Attah’s 30-ish wife finds the rewards of her marriage to the septuagenarian of “Kweku’s House” not what she bargained for. A woman in her 40s discovers her longtime lover has fathered children with two other women in Anne Sackey’s “Intentional Consequences.” Some hustlers wreak havoc on others. Ernest Kwame Nkrumah Addo’s young heroine learns that her husband’s source of income must cost her something precious in “The Driver.” And the vengeful husband in editor Danquah’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” is a hustler who hustles himself. There’s plenty of noir to go around in this all-too-sad volume about people struggling to get by.
VULTURES IN THE SKY
Downing, Todd Penzler Publishers (285 pp.) $25.95 | Dec. 1, 2020 978-1-61316-179-1
Murder strikes a Pullman coach bound for Mexico City from San Antonio, and then strikes again and again in this reprint from 1935. The third of six adventures featuring U.S. Treasury agent Hugh Rennert finds the trip already underway after agent Edgar Graves has apparently fainted (he’s actually been given a lethal injection of nicotine) on the departure platform back in the San Antonio train station. Hardly have the bland characters—cotton mill owner Jackson Saul King, albino William Searcey, novelty 32
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1 october 2020
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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