Oware Mosaic

Set in a postapocalyptic Ghana in the year 2025, Nzondi’s Afrofuturist debut puts a fresh spin on familiar procedural story beats. Driving home after a night of drinking, 17-year-old Feeni Xo hits and appears to kill a teenage girl and enlists her brother to help cover it up. Guilt over the accident causes Feeni to seek refuge in House of Oware, an investigation-themed VR game embedded in her neural implant. The game usually draws from cold cases for its plots, but this time Feeni recognizes the dead body as the girl she ran over. Unbeknownst to Feeni, her in-game partner, Samora Lamp, is the older sister of the dead girl, Jinny. Working together to uncover what really happened the night Jinny died puts them on the trail of a group of human traffickers and a hacker capable of infecting neural implants with a deadly virus. Nzondi capably blends genres in this satisfying mystery, breathing new life into science fiction and urban fantasy tropes. This brisk, affecting story feels wholly original. (Oct.)