Annamaria Alfieri (Blood Tango) trades her standard South American setting for early-20th-century colonial Africa in Strange Gods, a passionate mystery.
Even though her teenage brother, Otis, is allowed to hunt with the men, 20-year-old Vera McIntosh can't get permission to do anything that smacks of adventure. Raised in Africa by Scottish missionary parents, Vera is too in love with the wild beauty of British East Africa (she lives in the part that is now Kenya) to want to be the proper, housebound lady her mother wishes her to be. Vera longs for excitement and romance, particularly with handsome policeman Justin Tolliver.
Unfortunately, the officer is pulled into her family's orbit not by love, but murder. When Vera's reprobate uncle Josiah is found stabbed with a Masai spear, authorities are quick to blame the crime on a native "witch doctor," but Tolliver and his African partner Kwai Libazo think the killer is someone within the British community. Josiah's outward respectability as a doctor covered a dissolute and sexually rapacious nature. Was his death the result of a medicine man's jealousy, a business deal gone awry, or a love affair that soured? If Tolliver and Libazo can't find the answer, the accused native man will hang; their only aid comes from the forthright and bewitching Vera.
While Alfieri doesn't paper over the colonial presumption of superiority, her heroes remain honorable and dynamic enough to earn readers' respect. Both a taut whodunit and a subtle commentary on sexual and racial double standards, Alfieri's latest will have readers dreaming of Africa. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads