Hour of the Red God by Richard Crompton

Sarah Crichton Books, 304 pages, $26 (c2013)

British ex-pat Richard Crompton lives in Nairobi, Kenya. He was a BBC journalist who has found new life as the writer of an excellent first book, “Hour of the Red God.” His main character is Mollel, a Maasai police officer.

Mollel is a mysterious character when he first appears. He has been dismissed to some backwater as a traffic cop following an unknown incident that occurred when he was a CID detective in Nairobi. He returns to his old stomping ground to assist in the murder of a young woman, whose mutilated body was found in a ditch.

The first thing we see Mollel do is abandon and forget his nine-year-old son at a store as he chases a crook. Just as my anxiety level racheted up over the boy, I reached the part of the book in which Mollel suddenly remembers him. There was then a suspenseful interlude while Mollel found his son. And that’s not even the main story.

Mollel’s wife is gone. His mother-in-law is critical of his parenting skills. He is traumatized and lost. There are mysterious pills he has to take.

Upon delivering the crook he caught to the CID, he meets some of his old cohorts. Somehow he manages to become involved in the new case of the murder of the girl in the ditch. He is assigned Kiunga, a new detective, to assist him.

The victim might have been a prostitute. Could one of her high-flying clients have silenced her? Was someone jealous of her? Did someone from her past catch up with her? The usual suspects, we think. But Crompton has thought his way into a complex story which takes us into the heart of Nairobian society and politics. Crompton does a great job of creating a picture of that society, complete with tribal affiliations and government corruption, struggling to fit into the 21st century.