What is this about?
This is about the investigation into Gordon Tilson, an American who came to Ghana to find the woman he had fallen in love with online, and finds instead he was duped. Emma Djan, a PI at a local detective agency won’t give up on the case.
What else is this about?
I actually think for an MC Emma really isn’t in this book nearly enough. Instead, Qartey seems to have taken a mystery surrounding one man, and turned it into something else entirely that reaches into the politics of Ghana. And it’s frigging boring.
Blurb
‘Quartey provides such a strong sense of Ghana that you’ll be wishing for a platter of kenkey’ Oprah.com
Gordon Tilson is a lonely American widower, who has found solace in an online support group. He befriends a young Ghanaian widow, and when her sister is in a car accident, he sends her thousands of dollars to cover the hospital bill – to the horror of his son, Derek. And when Gordon runs off to Ghana to surprise his new love but disappears without a trace, Derek hurries overseas himself, fearful for his father’s safety.
Frustrated by the lack of interest from local police, Derek turns to Emma Djan, the newest member of a private detective agency. The case of the missing American man will drag both Emma and Derek into a world of sakawa scams and corruption.
I wanted to like The Missing American so much, but mostly it just left me frustrated with terrible pacing, and numerous plot threads that only came together at the end of the book.
Problem is, the journey to the point when everything was tied up seemed to not have any purpose, and to be quite frank, took time away from Emma herself.
Me reading about everything else but Emma
Everything and the kitchen sink
The Missing American is heavy on detail on numerous things and characters, that in the end really didn’t matter for me. There are details around Gordon Tilson, and characters at the police station that make no difference to me and in my opinion the story itself. Then there’s the inclusion of an centre for autism, the children there and honestly, so much more, I just didn’t care about.
There are also details around how scams are run, and the spiritual aspects that the scammers rely on in order to make their scams a success. While this was interesting to an extent, I just wanted to know about Emma.
While things make sense at the end, they literally only make sense in the last few chapters of the book. The chapters preceding the ending (ie thee entire book) these elements appear for no real reason, and there’s no hint as to how this all ties together in a larger political story.
Maybe that’s the problem — this story wants to be bigger than the mystery, and wants to be a commentary on Ghana and corruption, when all the blurb tells me is that there’s this fantastic female PI, Emma Djan, who is involved in a tragic mystery around a missing man who had thought he fallen in love with someone online.
So what about Emma?
Me reading about Emma
Emma is a determined young police officer when the book opens, who wants to move into homicide. She grew up listening to her father tell her stories about his time as a homicide cop, and she absorbed them, and made them her dreams too.
Unfortunately, Emma’s time at the police force is cut short in the worst way, and she finds herself trying to figure out what to do – – when an offer comes through from a PI office for a job.
And that PI office, and the other people there would have been infinitely more interesting to hear about.
We also learn about her brother, Bruno, who is is doing his own investigations, and again that ties into a larger corruption story the book is trying to tell. I would have liked to know more about Bruno and their childhood going up, but no, I don’t get anything of that.
This was so frustrating. It took me ages to get through it, but I was determined to to because I genuinely though Emma was worth it. That said, however, I don’t know if I’ll be continuing with this series. Maybe I’m just too scarred right now.
