Wife of the Gods
by Kwei QuarteySetting: Ghana
Genres: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural
Length: 9:21
Published on August 3, 2010
Pages: 336
Format: Audiobook Source: Audible
Introducing Detective Inspector Darko Dawson: dedicated family man, rebel in the office, ace in the field—and one of the most appealing sleuths to come along in years. When we first meet Dawson, he’s been ordered by his cantankerous boss to leave behind his loving wife and young son in Ghana’s capital city to lead a murder investigation: In a shady grove outside the small town of Ketanu, a young woman—a promising medical student—has been found dead under suspicious circumstances. Dawson is fluent in Ketanu’s indigenous language, so he’s the right man for the job, but the local police are less than thrilled with an outsider’s interference. For Dawson, this sleepy corner of Ghana is rife with emotional land mines: an estranged relationship with the family he left behind twenty-five years earlier and the painful memory of his own mother’s inexplicable disappearance. Armed with remarkable insight and a healthy dose of skepticism, Dawson soon finds his cosmopolitan sensibilities clashing with age-old customs, including a disturbing practice in which teenage girls are offered to fetish priests as trokosi, or Wives of the Gods. Delving deeper into the student’s haunting death, Dawson will uncover long-buried secrets that, to his surprise, hit much too close to home.
I was introduced to Kwei Quartey on a list of books that recommended his most recent book in this series. However, that description includes this sentence that I knew was just going to make me all kinds of irritated if I read the book.
“But when it becomes apparent that Katherine is infertile, Solomon’s extended family accuses her of being a witch, hounding her until the relationship is so soured Solomon feels compelled to order Katherine out of the house they shared.”
I was interested in reading a detective story set in Ghana though, so I went back to the first book in the series and gave it a try. This audiobook was included free on Audible.
The author is a doctor who grew up in Ghana. He came to the U.S. as a medical student after his father died. His mother was American and she returned to the U.S. He came with her. He hasn’t lived in Ghana as an adult. I’ve seen some posts from Ghanaians criticizing his knowledge of village life in Ghana. They liked the story but say that the book was obviously written by an outsider.
What struck me about this story was not so much the central mystery of who killed Gladys Mensah as the way that he portrays women as being treated. Obviously, this was what I was trying to avoid by going back to this book instead of book 6 but it is still here.
The wives of the god are given to the village fetish priest as teenage girls in payment for sins of the family. This is not a happy existence for them.
Accusations of witchcraft occur often in the story. It happens for reasons like infertility (obviously a witch has cursed you) or being a successful widow (obviously you are a witch). You have to keep reminding yourself that this isn’t a fantasy novel. It was 2010 in a real country. Even the post that was criticizing the accuracy of the book that something to say about that. It said that an attack on one woman for being a witch wouldn’t have happened like that. Not that it wouldn’t have happened – just not like that.
None of this is condoned in the book. One of the lines of thinking about why Gladys was killed was that she was educating the wives of the god about their rights. The detective does try to talk to Efia, who was the wife who found Gladys’ body, even though that isn’t allowed. This opens up a dialogue that opens her up to other possibilities in her life. (See, that’s why you gotta keep them womenfolk under your thumb! Can’t let them get to thinking!)
There is a lot of tension between the small town police force who are convinced that they have the right suspect in custody and Darko the city cop who has been forced upon them. There is police brutality. There is conflict between western medicine and traditional healing. There is conflict in Darko’s family on many sides. He is fighting with his mother-in-law over how to care for his sick son. This case has reunited him with an aunt and uncle he only met once when he was a child. He feels guilt over not knowing them better.
If you are looking for a book that is going to pull all of these threads together into one story, you may feel lost. But life, and this story, are more complicated than that.
