In Ghana, getting an education doesn’t promise a successful life but being a sakawa boy does. They answer to fetish priests who bestow magical powers on the sakawa boys in return for ghoulish tasks they perform for the priests. Sakawa boys run sophisticated internet scams on Americans. In this story, an American falls in love with a realistic woman, gives her money for an emergency, and travels to meet her. When he learns she doesn’t exist he begins investigating and then goes missing. New private detective Emma Djan is on the case, finds him, and then gets dragged into the sakawa world and police corruption. Excellent mystery, exceptional story, eloquently written. Highly recommended. ( )

Emma Djan has just been fired by the Accra police department because she refused the advances of the police chief. She lands a job with the city’s top detective agency and is quickly involved in locating an American, Gordon Tilson. He has come to Ghana to meet Helena, with whom he has fallen in love. The problem is that this is all part of an elaborate Internet fraud scheme to attract a naive, well to do American to pay for Helena’s cousin’s surgery….
This is a very good detective story involving police corruption, online fraud, murder, voodoo, interesting characters and a very good depiction of Emma and her abilities as a detective.
Highly Recommended ( )

Interesting mystery set in Ghana. ( )

A new series by Quartey (not Darko Dawson), featuring 26-year-old Emma Djan, who is fired from her boring procedural police job for not succumbing to sexual harassment. A homicide department colleague of her deceased father refers Emma to a private detective agency in Gabon. This agency is hired by American Derek Tilson to find his father Gordon, missing several weeks since arriving in Ghana, the victim of an elaborate internet romance scam, because the local police and U.S. embassy have not helped. Emma has to investigate the world of scammers (and their strange dependence on fetish priests, who promise them power and success, if they partake in horrifying rituals) as well as rampant political and police corruption. Gordon Tilson's stupidity, egged on by his dying journalist friend, is in a word, monumental. ( )

This is one of the more interesting mysteries that I have read in a long while.

We’re flung head first into the social niceties of Ghana when an American flies to Ghana, believing that he has found his ideal woman. Instead, he finds that she does not exist, and he is the victim of a scam.

An American journalist friend convinces him that to stay in Ghana and track down the scam would make an excellent story. Our American reluctantly agrees. He talks to the scammers known as Sakawa boys, authorities, including one whose wife he briefly had an affair with in the States, and even a traditional priest whose magic looks very dark indeed.

But then he goes dark. After several weeks with no contact, his son arrives in Ghana to look for him and ends up at the detective agency where Emma Dian is newly employed. Emma has had her own experience with corrupt cops and has had her hopes of working with the police force dashed.

This is an interesting look at the online scams – everything from programs designed to help the scam along, to officials not really believing that Americans being scammed is much of a problem.

I’m looking forward to the next Emma Dian novel. ( )