Knives Out but with Muppets

For armchair travelers and PI fans! Emma Djan works for a PI firm in Accra, Ghana. Her current case is a bit tricky since it comes from a friend of her boss: his daughter recently graduated from high school and disappeared from her home one night. The parents blame the boyfriend she suddenly was spending all her time with. But it’s not long into Emma’s investigation that she finds the boyfriend murdered, discovering he was a sex trafficker. Now she needs to find her missing woman and figure out who murdered her boyfriend…

If you want to start at the beginning, pick up The Missing American. And if you want a completed procedural series, pick up Quartey’s Wife of the Gods.

For fans of CIA agents, historical fic (’90s!), and inserted chapters from the killers point of view. Melvina Donleavy is able to recognize anyone she’s ever seen because her brain will put together things people don’t notice like the shape of the back of their head. This is why the CIA thinks she’s an asset. And why they send her on her first mission to Soviet Belarus. She’s undercover and with a team, but even her own team doesn’t know why she’s really there. And complicating things is that women have been disappearing, and being murdered, in Minsk. Because some of the victims have been sex workers, no one seems concerned to look for the possible serial killer. But Melvina wants to know and starts to ask a few questions, leading to a woman who spoke to her to be murdered. Melvina is already in enough danger with her assignment, and now she’s added to that and potentially placed the entire team in even more danger…

I chose the audiobook format, which I enjoyed, narrated by Eva Kaminsky. I liked the balance between character focus and intensity and could see this being adapted into a limited series.

If you want a procedural trilogy pick up Kent’s The Dime.

(TW sexual assault/ mentions terminal cancer diagnosis/ mentions suicidal plan/ mentions past child abuse/ faked suicide, brief detail/ brief mention animal cruelty)