In Harmattan Season, Tochi Onyebuchi (Goliath; Riot Baby) has created a fantasy noir tale perfect for fans of brooding sleuths and speculative magic. Onyebuchi's spare prose tells the story of Boubacar, a private detective in an alternate colonial West Africa where the French are very much still in charge. Bouba can move between the worlds of the colonizer and the colonized more easily than most, since he is a deux-fois, both Indigenous dugu and French.
But business has still been tough, and it's the beginning of harmattan season, when the dust of the Sahara blows in to scour everything. Bouba is in his room, thinking about his bad luck, when a girl abruptly appears and asks him to hide her. Bouba conceals her from the cops, but while they're questioning him about her, the girl vanishes. The next time Boubacar sees her, she's floating in midair above the marketplace, with streams of her blood spilling out into the sky all around her.
Clearly some nefarious magic is afoot, and Bouba is determined to find the source. As he digs for answers, however, Bouba uncovers even more questions--questions that might alter the future of the entire colony.
Clever and hard-boiled, Harmattan Season is both a throwback to 1930s crime novels and a wildly inventive take on colonial history. Fans of alternate history or stubbornly independent detectives are sure to enjoy spending time with Boubacar. --Jessica Howard, former bookseller, freelance book reviewer