When Dr. Philip Taiwo is called on by a powerful Nigerian politician to investigate the public torture and murder of three university students in Port Harcourt, he has no idea that he's about to be enveloped by a perilous case that is far from cold. Philip is not a detective. He's an investigative psychologist, an academic more interested in figuring out the why of a crime than actually solving it. But when he steps off the plane and into the dizzying frenzy of the provincial airport, he soon realizes that the mob-driven murder of the Okriki Three isn't as straight forward as he thought. With the help of his loyal and streetwise personal driver, Chika, Philip must work against those actively conspiring against him to parse together the truth of what happened to these students.…
"I’ve been excited in the past couple of years to see more crime fiction that took me to Africa. One of my favourite books last year was The Missing American , set in Ghana. Light Seekers is set in Nigeria , with the action starting off in Lagos and taking the reader to Okriki, a small university town near Port Harcourt, a big centre for the Nigerian oil industry. There is never any mystery about the crime—mob violence that leads to the brutal killing of three students—but the lead character, an investigative psychologist who has recently returned from the United States, has been tasked to find out why it happened. Along the way, we pick up bits and pieces about the Biafran War, local history, tensions, corruption and the feelings of the main character as he adjusts to life back in Nigeria. Like Peter May’s book, Light Seekers is partly based on real events, in this case the horrific killing of four students in Aluu, Nigeria in 2012. That makes the book harder to read, but more important. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"
