Meet Weston Kogi, a London supermarket store detective. He returns home to his West African home country for his aunt’s funeral. He sees his family, his ex-girlfriend Nana, his old school mate Church. Food is good, beer is plentiful, and telling people he works as a homicide detective seems like harmless hyperbole, until he wakes up in hell.
He is kidnapped and forced by two separate rebel factions to investigate the murder of a local hero, Papa Busi. The solution may tip a country on the brink into civil war.
First off, I should clarify that Making Wolf isn’t a speculative fiction novel. I know that this is the “Fantasy” Inn, but when I saw that Tade Thompson of Rosewater fame was releasing a noir/crime novel, I had to check it out.
Making Wolf is set in the fictional West African nation of Alcacia, a country which borders Nigeria and has a large Yoruba population. Weston Kogi, a supermarket detective who has spent much of his recent life in London, travels back to his home country for his aunt’s funeral. Weston is a little disdainful of the places and people from his old life. He plans to leg it back to London as soon he can, and doesn’t want to engage too much in the happenings in his old hometown.
Unfortunately for him, he’s tasked with investigating a murder of a beloved political figure only a couple of days after landing. What’s worse, his employers are two opposing factions of a burgeoning civil war.
Making Wolf has a flair that sets it apart from the (admittedly few) other crime novels I’ve read. The political tensions of Alcacia were in my opinion interwoven flawlessly with Weston’s internal conflicts, each of them playing off and clashing against each other as the story moved forward. It felt like Weston was trapped in a gradually-tightening noose. The danger and the violence that he faced grew more and more vivid, and I was left guessing at how he would squirm his way free. I found this to be a very well-paced story, and Weston experienced a good mix of successes and failures in his investigation, which served to keep things interesting.
Thompson has a very understated, matter-of-fact style of writing that I can’t get enough of. Scenes of extreme violence are described in a very detached manner that lend them a sense of gravity. Weston’s emotions come to the forefront in these moments, as his anxieties and worries bleed through the sentence structure.
I found myself invested in Weston’s journey. I understood his desire to break free of the brutal, corrupt world that he’d believed he had previously escaped from. But I also understood how, on some level, he could enjoy the experience. For me, internal contradictions like this always make for the most interesting characters.
The cast of secondary characters is rather small, but then this is a small book at only around 250 pages. Nana (Weston’s ex-girlfriend) and Church (Weston’s psychopathic ex-schoolmate), are the two characters that see the most page-time. Nana’s motivations are a bit of a mystery for most of the book, but Church has a certain dangerous, manic charisma that helps to drive the plot. I would have liked to see a little bit more of what made each of these characters tick, but the focus of the narration was very much on Weston throughout the story. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It enabled me to immerse myself in Weston’s way of thinking, allowing for a more invovled reading experience.
To sum up, Making Wolf is an incredibly exciting political crime novel. Those who prefer more flowery prose might be better served to look elsewhere, but those looking for a well-paced, dangerous ride need look no further.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thank you to Constable for the review copy!
