cover image Death Underfoot

Death Underfoot

Dennis Casley, D. J. Casley. St. Martin's Press, $18.95 (207pp) ISBN 978-0-312-10966-0

This splendid, deftly characterized first mystery unfolds in a Kenya whose gorgeous scenery obscures theft, political corruption, tribal rivalry, terror and murder. In a land where the elephant is vanishing and the skies are polluted by fumes from heavy traffic, Inspector James Odhiambo represents another endangered species: an honest Kenyan cop. Invited by a lawyer friend to visit Hawk's Nest, a treetop game-viewing lodge, Odhiambo, a member of the Luo tribe, is present when femme fatale Diana Farwell plunges over a railing and is trampled to death by a herd of elephants that have been stampeded by a rifle shot. Odhiambo soon determines that she was was murdered, but it takes him longer to uncover the motive. His investigation is blocked by the regional administrator trying to protect Kenya's main revenue source, tourism, and by a sadistic and powerful white man named Price-Allen, unofficially in charge of internal police intelligence, who orders the suicide-like murder of another guest who had been jailed for the killing. Odhiambo is sure that someone else in the dead woman's party murdered her, but it takes the panga (knife) slaying of his lawyer friend and evidence found among his effects to establish which, of many possible motives, led to the woman's death. (May)