Hell’s Gate

The jaw-dropping opening of Crompton’s outstanding second Detective Mollel novel (after 2013’s Hour of the Red God) finds the honest Nairobi cop, a Maasai, in prison, surrounded by hostile inmates. When the criminal who runs the prison, Mdosi, summons Mollel to his private room and asks why his men on the outside keep disappearing, their meeting ends in violence. A guard hears a disturbance and catches the detective red-handed, holding a bloody shard of glass and standing over Mdosi’s body. A flashback presents the events of the previous week. In doing his job too well by solving a prostitute’s murder, Mollel has outraged “some of the most powerful people in the city.” His boss demotes and transfers him, literally, to Hell, a small town near Kenya’s Hell’s Gate national park. Greeted with suspicion by the corrupt local police force, Mollel ends up on a twisted path that leads to his incarceration. Crompton effectively integrates Maasai culture into the absorbing plot. Agency: William Morris Endeavor (U.K.). (June)