In an author’s note, Quartey warns the reader that the subject matter of his novel, based on extensive research, is “tough to read.” He’s not wrong. But rather than immediately immersing the reader in sexual violence and despair, Quartey takes a path full of grace and care, devoted to a detailed study of character. The story starts with Emma, his likable protagonist, experiencing the excitement of a new love with her boyfriend, navigating the complications of her relationship with her mother and enjoying the camaraderie of her fellow investigators. In this way the reader is offered a sure hand just as the story’s most perilous journeys begin.
Although “Last Seen in Lapaz” follows the course of Emma’s investigation, including a chilling stretch when she goes undercover as a sex worker, huge swaths are told through the perspectives of Femi and Ngozi, as well as Kehinde, a young man who, along with his girlfriend, is duped by Femi and thrown into the harrowing world of migration as they seek a better life. The result is an unsparing look into places from which polite society would rather avert its eyes. Quartey uses his considerable gifts as a novelist to make sure that the reader finishes the book with a clear picture of the cruelty in these worlds, plunging us into brutal camps run by ruthless men, places where death seems to be a prisoner’s best hope.
Despite the grim subject at its heart, the novel is also entertaining. The narrative moves quickly as Emma’s investigation races to its conclusion, as hope and dread wrestle, even as the novel provides a necessary education. Victims of sex trafficking aren’t taken only by force, as often depicted in popular movies and television shows, but also by coercion and fraud — a reflection of the most common ways young men and women are ensnared into trafficking. The shift in perspectives allows us to understand how people can be made susceptible to such practices and, rather than observing this hell from the periphery, we’re taken deep into the minds and hearts of vulnerable characters. There is courage in these pages, in every sense — in the choices of the story’s heroes, the storytelling and the extensive research Quartey reportedly undertook to inform his story.
It’s often easy for crime-fiction writers to get lost in the details, to spend more time describing the characteristics of firearms or criminal operations than the complicated souls of their characters — authorial choices that earn the dismissive, scornful complaint that, too often, genre fiction places plot over people. But in “Last Seen in Lapaz,” the crimes and characters inform each other. The result is a thrilling mystery, a compulsively emotional novel that doesn’t turn away from either extreme violence or the necessity of hope. After hearing a distressing experience from one of the characters, Quartey writes of Emma, “She didn’t realize that, if only she had been listening more carefully, she could have solved the murder of Femi Adebanjo then and there.”
With “Last Seen in Lapaz,” Quartey asks us, like Emma, to listen to the stories of the people who have experienced the horror described in these pages, and to find the courage and compassion to help them.
E.A. Aymar’s most recent thriller is “No Home for Killers.”
An Emma Djan Investigation
Soho Crime. 360 pp. $27.95
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