Hard-hitting talk show host Augustus Seeza has become a household name in Ghana, though plagued by rumors of lavish overspending, alcoholism, and womanizing. He’s dating the imposing, beautiful Lady Araba, who leads a self-made fashion empire. Araba’s religious family believes Augustus is after her money and intervenes to break them up. A few days later, just before a major runway show, Araba is found murdered in her bed. Her driver is arrested after a hasty investigation, but Araba’s favorite aunt, Dele, has always thought Augustus Seeza was the real killer.

Almost a year later, Dele approaches Emma Djan, who has finally started to settle in as the only female PI at her agency. To solve Lady Araba’s murder, Emma must not only go on an undercover mission that dredges up trauma from her past, but navigate a long list of suspects with solid alibis. Emma quickly discovers that they are willing to lie for each other—and that one may still be willing to kill.- Goodreads

A slow read but I surprisingly enjoyed this one. For starters, this is book two. I did not read the first book nor did I feel I needed to. The characters all feel like you are meeting them for the first time and that includes Emma, who the book is supposed to be about (technically). And I thought that was a little weird; compared to other books, the detective is just as much as the focus as the investigation but I think because the story is told in multiple perspectives is a reason why Emma isn't a bigger focus.

As I previously mentioned, this is a slow read but not necessarily because it feels like its being dragged. The author adds a lot of details, important ones, to build up the setting as well as the character's personality. The images were very clear in my mind and the emotion was real. I felt so bad for Lady Araba, when you find out the truth about everything . . . she didn't deserve it by any means.

There is a lack of intensity in this book but there is a sense of urgency. The bit of political discord also added to the drama of the story and it was great as it made it well rounded.

Overall, I liked this one and will back track to read the first one.

4 Pickles

this was a great sequel to The Missing American, I had enjoyed that very much and was glad I was able to pick this one up. It was a great mystery and I enjoyed getting to know the characters in this book.

This was a great mystery novel. I love mysteries and this one was no exception.

The story was well written and the pace was great. It kept me entertained throughout.

I don't want to say much because I don't want to give anything away but this is a great book that I would recommend.

Thanks to Netgalley for Sleep Well, My Lady by Kwei Quartey. This the second book in the Emma Djan series. Really it is more of an ensemble cast since Emma works for The Sowah detective agency and there are several other detectives active in the case she is trying to solve. The best thing about this murder mystery is learning something about Ghanaian culture and language. The thing I like least was that a detective would interview a subject and at the next agency meeting the entire episode would be repeated. This happened several times. Also there was very little character development. All that said, it was still entertaining.

I enjoyed the first in this series and equally enjoyed the second. The non-linear narrative worked and I like the setting and characters.

Kwei Quartey continues his PI Emma Djan series (The Missing American) in Sleep Well, My Lady, an intriguing mystery that centers on the murder of a famous Ghanaian designer. Lady Araba, the mogul of her own fashion label, has had a tumultuous on-and-off affair with talk show host Augustus Seeza for several years. When her body is found in her bed the day before an important runway show, many people are immediately suspicious that Augustus, an alcoholic, was involved.

But Augustus has influential parents--a doctor and a judge--and when Lady Araba's driver signed a confession under duress, the largely ineffective Ghanaian police were content to let the driver go to prison, without ever testing the evidence from the scene for DNA.

A year after Araba's death, her aunt Dele comes to the private detective agency where Emma Djan works, seeking the truth about Araba's death. Dele is sure that the driver, who loyally served Araba for years, could not have been involved. As Emma and the other investigators at the agency start digging, they discover that nothing in Araba's life was as glamorous as it seemed. Araba had been hiding a dark secret since her childhood, and competitors in the cutthroat fashion industry could also have wanted her dead.

Vividly invoking the noisy world of Accra, Ghana, Quartey has created a delightful character in Emma Djan, and a satisfyingly twisty mystery in Sleep Well, My Lady. Fans of Andrea Camilleri or Colin Cotterill are sure to enjoy Quartey's talented writing.

This book offers readers the chance to again spend time with Emma Djan as it follows on this author’s earlier novel, The Missing American. This time Emma is looking into what happened to a fashion icon. Sadly, Lady Araba is murdered. Our female PI is asked to look into the case. She thus becomes involved in a complicated situation with many suspects and issues. Who killed Lady Araba? Why? Readers will keep turning the pages to find out.

One thing I really enjoyed in this novel was the setting in Ghana. It offered a chance to immerse the reader in the life of the people and their communities.

This book has received high praise from Publisher’s Weekly and others. Give it a look!

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this title. All opinions are my own..
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I missed the first book in this series but if it is as good as this one, it will be a real treat. A murder of a well known fashion designer in Ghana brings the private.investigator back on the scene. Emma goes undercover in various roles to solve the crime with her colleagues. A family secret, a fashion rival, a former lover are just some of the suspects in this methodical and colorful investigation. Brings the culture to life. Helpful recaps of the evidence through the investigative meetings enhance the story. Well plotted. Too much hoping around in time but still a satisfying read.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

I loved THE MISSING AMERICAN, the first book in Kwei Quartey's new series, and enjoyed SLEEP WELL, MY LADY, just as much. Set in Ghana, Emma Djan and her fellow private investigators look into the death of Lady Araba Tagoe. A famous fashion designer, her body is discovered in her elegant Trosacco home on the morning of the most important fashion show. Who killed Lady Araba? Her lover? Her chauffeur? Her father? Secrets are uncovered, motive are revealed in this page turner. Good to the very last page!

I posted this in GoodReads, Amazon, and BookBub (the latter under my pseudonym, Allison Brook) And my Marilyn Levinson Author fb page.

A successful, wealthy designer is found dead by her gardner the morning of her fashion show in the exclusive community in which she lives. Lady Adaba had been involved in an on again/off again with Augustus Seezaa well known talk show host despite the scandal caused by his being married, his financial problems and losing his job after his alcoholism became public knowledge during a disastrous on air interview.
Although a year has passed and an arrest was made, Lady Adabas’ aunt is not satisfied with the slipshod investigation and hires Emma Djan, a female PI.
As the team of investigators begin looking at the list of suspects they find that there is a long list of suspects and must learn if the police are inept or complicit in the coverup of what really happened.
This was a straightforward murder mystery that was well written and a look into a country that is not often represented in fiction. I had difficulty when I started but I was quickly drawn in to the story. This is another book that I found myself stopping when something caught my attention such as the amount that one of the characters was being paid for a day of construction work(less than $5.00 USD !!). The author does include a glossary of terms at the end for those interested. One thing we do recognize is how women are spoken to, regarded,treated.
This does touch on subjects that may trigger some readers - incest, sexual harassment, alcoholism.
For readers who often complain about graphic violence this is the book for you, well written, engaging without gore.
Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for the free ebook in exchange for my honest opinion. This book is the second in a series featuring Emma Djan and both are available now.

Locked door mystery set in Ghana, against a backdrop of police incompetence and corruption. Trigger warnings for child abuse and domestic violence. Lady Araba Tagoe is a fashion designer and member of Ghana's high society when she is murdered. Was she murdered by a business competitor, an employee, a family member, or her troubled, alcoholic lover?

I enjoyed the first book in this series and was excited to read more. I felt like it was a bit of a slow burn. There was a lot of set up and I felt like the characters were a little one dimensional.

This is the follow up to Quartey’s series debut, The Missing American, which, while excellent, was at times almost needlessly complicated. The star of the book in every way was Emma Djan, who lives in Ghana and has left the police force to work at a private investigation firm. She’s a fully realized, complex, nuanced and charming character, and as a reader you are with her at every plot turn.

This book felt much stronger to me, the plot was more streamlined (though still entertainingly tricky), and while Quartey always infused his stories with some real heartbreak he also is a wonderful pure mystery writer. The clues are fair and well laid.

Set in Accra, Ghana, the Ghanaian culture is a character in the book as much as any of the people in the story. Ghana sounds like an incredibly lively and vital place with a police department that’s more interested in solving cases than finding the actual perpetrators of the crime. Emma’s boss, Mr. Sowah, is also a former cop, and he is excellent at working the system.

Quartey is also excellent at making you truly feel for the victim. In both books the victim becomes a fully realized person, thanks to Quartey’s use of a timeline that dips forward and backward in time. As the book opens the beautiful Lady Araba, a fashion designer, is missed from her fashion show at the opening of Accra fashion week.

Unfortunately, Lady Araba’s gardener has just discovered her dead in her bedroom. Quartey skillfully illuminates Araba’s backstory, as well as her relationship with Augustus Seeza, a well-known talk show host (known for asking penetrating and difficult questions of his subjects). Augustus, unfortunately, is also a raging alcoholic, and Kwartey’s explication of his life and the toll it takes on those around him, from his parents to his ex wife to Lady Araba, is heartbreakingly and realistically depicted.

Emma’s agency is hired to look into Araba’s murder by her aunt, who is sure the wrong person (Araba’s driver) is in jail. She is sure Augustus is the real culprit. As Mr. Sowah deploys his agents to a number of different places, Emma finds herself backstage at Accra’s fledgling forensic lab. The clues she is able to uncover both at the lab and through a talk with a coroner help her to solve the case.

Like any golden age writer, Kwartey’s suspect pool is tight, and he deflects suspicion from one to another with ease and skill. It’s easy to suspect each one in turn as you try and figure out who really killed Lady Araba.
Kwartey has a spectacular voice and his Ghanaian setting is not only unusual, it gives him plenty of scope. The first book was about internet scammers, who are decidedly poorer and working class, while this book is set within Accra’s more privileged class. I think the sky is the limit for future installments as he has a wide canvas, a deft hand with a plot, and a real genius with character. Emma Djan is someone to treasure.

As much as the premise seemed interesting, and even the start of the book pulled me in, I, unfortunately, found myself loosing interest pretty quickly, and couldn't get it back. I would read another book by the author to give it another shot though.

2/5 Stars

Kwei Quartey's second installment in the Emma Djan Investigation series treats us to more insights into Ghanaian society, including the upper echelons of it, and yet more questionable policing. This novel centers on the murder of fashion designer and influencer Lady Araba, a beautiful and self-made woman who has overcome a fairly awful childhood at the hands of her Anglican minister father. Quartey paints a rich and detailed back story cutting back and forth over time, to Araba's childhood abuse, to her fashion success, her close relationship with her aunt, and her relationship with the very questionable Augustus Seeza, a popular talk show host with a hard-hitting program called "Tough Questions." Seeza is from a powerful family in Accra; his father is a prominent judge and his mother is a doctor. But Seeza is a very problematic boyfriend- he's married and on top of that, he is a serious alcoholic. When Araba is murdered, her chauffer is charged, but her Aunt Dele doesn't for a minute believe that Kweku-Sam is the culprit. It's only a matter of time until Dele contacts the Sowah Private Investigators Agency and Emma Djan is on the case!

I love the character of Emma Djan and was somewhat surprised that she didn't appear in the novel until page 61! That did however allow the reader to develop a sympathetic sense of Araba's life, and her relationship with the troubled and self-destructive Augustus, who is Dele's prime suspect in Araba's murder. Only were there others who might have wanted Araba out of the way?

This was another engaging installment in the Emma Djan series. I love her shrewd tenacity. The ending, as in the first novel, shows that things are seldom linear when it comes to crimes of this nature. This novel can still be read as an entry point into the series, though the reader will certainly then want to learn about how Emma became a PI in the first place, in the first novel, The Missing American. This series is really a great find.

I'll report back about the audiobook when it is released.

CW: child sexual abuse

I received a digital and paper review copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Accra, Ghana: Lady Araba Tagoe was a rising star in the world of fashion. Augustus Seiza’s once stellar career as a hard-hitting talk show host was sinking after years of alcohol-fueled missteps and erratic behavior. Their tumultuous relationship was the stuff of legend. Both sets of parents disapproved: Lady Araba’s strait-laced, staunchly religious family disliked his alcoholism and immoral behavior; Seiza’s wealthy and powerful parents thought she was responsible for their son’s deterioration, and think she is a gold digger of loose morals.
When the Lady’s gardener found her blood-soaked body in the bedroom of her palatial home in an exclusive gated community, Seiza was the logical suspect, but the police quickly arrest Lady Araba’s driver, case closed.
Ten months later, after the police refuse to investigate further, Lady Araba’s Aunt Dele asks private investigator Emma Djan and her colleagues to take another look at the case. She believes the driver was scapegoated. She is adamant that Augustus Seiza murdered her niece, and she makes a good case for that.
As the private investigators dig into the murder, they do find that much of the evidence points to Seiza, but he’s not the only one with motive. Emma found others who might want to do away with Lady Tagoe for business or personal reasons, including members of both the Tagoe and Seiza families.
Emma Djan is a compelling protagonist, reminiscent of an edgier version of Alexander McCall Smith’s Mma Precious Ramotswe in The No. 1 Lady Detectives Agency’s mystery series, also set in Africa. The other characters are well-drawn, and the plot is full of twists and turns.

The opening chapters of Sleep Well My Lady jump back and forth between various time frames so often that this caused me some minor annoyance, but once the backstory was established, I became immersed in the story-- something that is very easy for me to do each time I pick up a book written by Kwei Quartey.

The murder of Lady Araba is an intricately layered puzzle, and even though this is the second book in the Emma Djan mystery series, it takes the hard work of the entire detective agency to solve the crime. The work of a talented ensemble cast slowly peels back layer after layer of the truth. So many people have strong motives to want this talented woman dead that the reader will probably have trouble deducing which person had not only the desire but the will, to carry out the murder.

One of the things that Quartey illustrates so ably in Sleep Well My Lady is that the problems with the Ghana police force are not just limited to bribery or "looking the other way," and it's in showing readers this that he created two striking minor characters whom I hope to see in future books. One is the forthright Dr. Jauregui from Cuba, and the other is a member of the police force who is told: "...it's tough to be an island of integrity when sneaky crocodiles are all around, circling you." With the world events of the past four years, I think we all know how rare these "islands of integrity" are.

If you enjoy well-written mysteries with standout characters and a strong sense of place, you can't go wrong with anything written by Kwei Quartey. Once you've read the Emma Djan series (the first book is The Missing American), try his Darko Dawson series beginning with Wife of the Gods. You've got some excellent reading ahead of you.

Happy to include this new book in January's Novel Encounters, my monthly top ten roundup column of notable upcoming fiction titles for Zoomer magazine’s Books section. To read the feature, click on the link.

Who murdered Lady Araba? The Ghanaian fashion designer was at the top of her game and she was about to push a reckoning on sexual abuse. Her aunt doesn't believe that her driver, who has been in jail for almost a year did it, and she hires Emma Djan and her PI firm to find the truth. This moves back and forth in time (a lot) especially in the beginning to tell Lady Araba's story. She was not well served by her family, especially her father who routinely assaulted her, or by her lover Augustus, an alcoholic media personality. But were these the ones who did it? No spoilers from me but know that you might be surprised by what happened. I liked this for the setting (I learned about Ghana) and the resulting atmospherics. While this is meant to be the second in a series featuring Emma, I read it as a standalone and it was fine. Emma was not, however, the star here but rather a player in a more complex set of characters. She's not introduced until about 25 percent in. I'm not sure how well the time shifts worked but the plot kept me reading. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I'm looking forward to another installment.

When a prominent Ghanaian fashion designer is murdered in her exclusive gated community, her aunt is convinced the police have arrested the wrong man, so hires a private investigator to look into the television celebrity she believes is the guilty party. The police make an arrest, but the victim’s aunt is sure they have the wrong man. Her niece had a stormy on-again off-again relationship with Augustus Seeza, host of a popular hard-hitting television talk show. In spite of being charming and talented, his alcoholism and lavish lifestyle have tarnished his reputation. Convinced the corrupt and ineffective police have grabbed the wrong man simply to close the case, Lady Araba’s aunt asks Emma Djan’s private investigation firm to investigate.

Some of Kwei Quartey’s previous mysteries have introduced American readers to unfamiliar aspects of Ghanaian culture. Here, the surprise for those who may know little about modern Africa is the discovery that many Ghanaians would be perfectly comfortable living on the upper West Side of Manhattan, though they may find it a bit dirty and dangerous compared to home. The plot, which offers a number of suspects and some suspenseful undercover work by a team of private investigators, is similar to a Golden Age mystery set among manor houses and has a similarly deliberate pacing as the various suspects are checked out. Yet there are plenty of distinctly Ghanaian touches to keep it fresh, and a glossary in the back for those who may not know banku from a banger or a chaley from a bloke.

Some readers may find the layered time frames of the narrative hard to follow, though I found it effective. My only complaint is that Emma Djan doesn’t appear for the first fifty pages, and shares the story of the investigation with the other staff of the agency. Though the team makes for a strong ensemble cast, next time - more Emma, please.