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.
Kwei Quartey is a physician practicing in the Los Angeles area, but his first love was always writing. When he was eight-years-old, he wrote three short novels that he bound with colorful cardboard covers. They were mystery stories, and Quartey has retained his preference for that genre into adulthood. His novel WIFE OF THE GODS is a murder mystery set in Ghana, West Africa. Quartey is able to set his story in that country because he grew up there until his late teens. He is the son of an African American mother and Ghanaian father.
While in medical school and during his training as a physician, Quartey found little to no time to write, but once he began his practice, he was able to return to his very early ambition to be an author. The arc of his career began with a UCLA extension class in creative writing, then about three years of belonging to a writing group. Thereafter, Quartey settled down to writing on his own. One novel, KAMILA, was subsidy published, which gained him no traction in the publishing world.
His idea for his present novel, WIFE OF THE GODS, was born at the turn of the millennium. It went through multiple transformations before it was ready to be shown. Agent Marly Rusoff, highly regarded in the publishing world, took Quartey's novel on and sold it to Random House at auction.
In WIFE OF THE GODS, featuring Detective Darko Dawson, the tangible, physical world coexists with beliefs in another realm of gods and their magical powers, and it is against this complicated background that Darko must try to solve the mystery of the murder of a beautiful young woman in a small rural town.
Quartey notes that there are many parallels between detective work and being a physician. In the first place, both doctors and detectives are presented with mysteries they must solve. In the physician's case, it's an unknown illness or cause of an illness. Detectives interview suspects and witnesses, doctors interview patients. A detective and a doctor both have a set of clues that they must try and sort out to get to the bottom of the mystery, and some of those clues may be red herrings that lead them astray. In addition, just as a detective must strive to understand the patient's perspective, the detective must "get into the mind" of his suspect.
The next Darko Dawson novel is CHILDREN OF THE STREET, release date July 12, 2011. His novel, KAMILA, now on Kindle, might be called "Life before Darko Dawson." In the early to mid nineties, Quartey subsidy published this story of a young Algerian woman who gets caught between the love of a Frenchman and the persuasions of a fiery young nationalist Arab who wants Kamila to join the cause. This is a very different kind of book from the mystery genre that Quartey loves.
