Esperance by Adam Oyebanji Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, science fiction, science fiction mystery
Pages: 432
Published by DAW on May 20, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
The history-bending speculative fiction from Adam Oyebanji, award-winning author of BRAKING DAY.
An impossible death: Detective Ethan Krol has been called to the scene of a baffling murder: a man and his son, who appear to have been drowned in sea-water. But the nearest ocean is a thousand miles away.
An improbable story: Hollie Rogers doesn’t want to ask too many questions of her new friend, Abi Eniola. Abi claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria, but her high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest she’s not telling the whole truth.
An incredible quest: As Ethan’s investigation begins to point towards Abi, Hollie’s fears mount. For Abi is very much not who she seems. And it won’t be long before Ethan and Hollie find themselves playing a part in a story that spans cultures, continents… and centuries.
An extraordinary speculative thriller about the scars left by the Atlantic slave-trade, by a master of the genre.
My Review:
Lake Michigan is a freshwater lake. There are no bodies of saltwater closer than the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles away. Unless you’re counting the gigantic saltwater tank and the Shedd Aquarium, which Chicago Police Detective Ethan Krol is forced to think about in this puzzle of a case.
The double homicide that he’s been called to utterly defies explanation. But as the lead investigator, he’s going to be required to both explain it and solve it, regardless.
A man and his baby son have been murdered, at home in their luxury apartment. Along with a barracuda. The two humans died by drowning – in seawater, while presumably the barracuda died from lack of the same. The man’s wife, the mother of the little boy, was in a profound coma in a nearby room. There are no marks or wounds on either of the bodies, but the man has plaster dust under his fingernails.
It’s a mystery – and it’s only the first of many.
When Krol reaches out to his fellow cops in the U.S. and even Interpol looking for any similar cases ANYWHERE he feels like he’s ‘casting his bread upon the waters’ or perhaps leaping and hoping the net will appear. Both turn out to be apt metaphors.
In either case, he’s successful – at least in discovering that there are other cops with similar cases who have been left just as puzzled as he is. A case in Nigeria a few years ago involving the dead man’s brother. A similar case in Rhode Island the next day. Meanwhile, a black woman of Amazonian proportions arrives in Bristol, England out of absolutely nowhere, with a mission to find the descendants of the captain of one very, very old shipwreck for reasons that she keeps very much to herself even as she eludes the police on what seems like a criminal rampage.
As information trickles and then pours in, it becomes obvious that all these events are linked – but to what? Something that combines Sherlock Holmes’ aphorism that “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” with Occam Razor’s “simplest explanation is usually the best one,” (for really wild and improbable definitions of ‘simple’) and plugs the whole thing straight into Clarke’s Law that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Escape Rating B+: This is one of those ‘mystery wrapped in an enigma’ stories that’s very much a part of the rising wave of SF mystery, and it does an excellent job of being both by starting the story from both sides of that SF + mystery equation.
It’s not like murder in Chicago is a new thing – not even among, let’s call it the upper, upper middle class. Which puts the frame directly around the wife, because the odds are that if a spouse is murdered, the other spouse had something to do with it.
Krol knows how to do his job, figures out that the frame doesn’t fit, and keeps on with dogged police work. (I do love me a good, solid, police procedural, and this is certainly that even as the procedures lead Krol straight into SFnal territory.)
At first, it’s the SFnal side of the story that is more than a bit, well, ‘out there’. So to speak. When Abidemi Eniola appears out of nowhere outside Bristol, she’s clearly a fish out of water. She’s dressed like an extra from a gangster movie, and talks like one as well. All her words are in English but they are combined in ways that don’t make sense. Or don’t make sense anymore, like she learned the language somewhere very isolated or very much behind the times.
(She talks like an extra from the Star Trek: Original Series episode “A Piece of the Action”.)
Abi needs a guide to the world in which she has found herself, and finds that guide – as well as a surprisingly loyal friend, in Hollie Rogers. Hollie helps her navigate while never knowing what she is leading – and being led – towards.
As Krol follows the trail by discovering the victims after the fact, Abi follows the same trail by researching who those victims will be. Of course they meet in the middle.
Which is where the truth comes out. A truth that is a huge spoiler, but also a truth that asks some equally huge questions about justice vs. vengeance, acknowledgement vs. reparations, and especially about what is owed and who should pay it.
I found the winding, twisted paths of this story’s mystery utterly fascinating, even as the SFnal aspects recalled Rivers Solomon’s historical fantasy, The Deep. And I adored the historical research that led to the ultimately very SFnal conclusion.
Howsomever I have to admit that the bittersweet parting at the end threw me off just a bit. OTOH, its conclusion is utterly right for the story and ties a perfect bow around the friendship between Abi and Hollie. But the way it reaches that perfect conclusion doesn’t quite make logical sense – unless, as has been true for their entire relationship, there’s something that Abi isn’t telling Hollie because she’s afraid that the truth will be too hard to bear.
