Book Review: The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu by Michael Stanley (Detective Kubu #2)

Stars: 4 out of 5
Pros: Interesting mystery; great characters

Cons: Overly complex and pacing issues (that eventually do pay off)

The Bottom Line:

A bit too complex

But setting and characters good

Mystery fans will like

Tinubu's Luck Runs Out when He is Murdered

I never would have picked up The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu on my own.  Heck, I hadn't even heard of it before it arrived in my mail box.  See, I was sent the book in exchange for an honest review.  And honestly, I enjoyed it.

The book is the second to star David "Kubu" Bengu, an assistant superintendent in the Criminal Investigations Department of Botswana.  Kubu earned his nickname because of his girth, Kubu being a local word for hippopotamus.

In this book, he's called to the Jackalberry Camp on the northern boarder of his country.  During the night, two men were murdered.  One was pushed over a cliff.  But Goodluck Tinubu was stabbed and mutilated.

Since the camp is isolated thanks to it's location in the Okavango Delta, Kubu begins focusing on the other guests and staff members.  He quickly learns that one guest, a man named Zondo, left early that morning before the bodies were discovered.  That makes Zondo the prime suspect.  Especially when Kubu learns that both Zondo and Goodluck were from neighboring Zimbabwe.  But then Kubu learns something surprising about Goodluck's past.  What does this new revelation have to do with the current murder?

Okay, so the title pretty much gives away the first plot twist.  But we are almost a quarter of the way into the story before we officially learn it.  And it just becomes another piece of a very interesting puzzle.  There are lots of pieces that Kubu needs to find and sort before he comes to the solution.  At times, the book felt a little slow to me, but it was never that way for very long.  About half was through, there is a chapter that pretty much summarizes the book to that point, and I was thankful.  I needed it to remember everything.  Yet it did all come together in a logical conclusion.

The characters were quite well developed.  We spent the most amount of time with Kubu, but there were plenty of chapters written from the points of view of others.  All those pieces eventually found their way into the story, although it took a while at times to see how.  It also made the suspects more real.

I have had a life long interest in Botswana, so this book was appealing to me for that reason.  I really did feel like I got a good picture of life there both personally and politically.  The descriptions were quite good at bringing the foreign country to life.

And the book is designed to be very user friendly.  The front includes a list of characters with pronunciation guide and maps of Botswana and specifically the layout of the camp.  The back includes a glossary of terms used in the book that might not be familiar to those reading it in America.

I will admit, I found those things a little off putting at first.  The book is 460 pages long.  I was truly afraid I was going to get into something that I would have a hard time following and I would need both lists and the maps on a regular basis to keep things straight.  That turned out to not be true.  I referred to the maps quite a bit, but I didn't really need them.  I might have referred to the character list and glossary a half dozen times combined.  The characters were memorable enough I didn't have trouble keeping them all straight.  The foreign words always made sense to me in context.

As I hinted at earlier, I did find the book overly long and complicated.  I'm not normally a fan of books this long, but I tried hard to set that aside as I was reading.  And I would find myself caught up in the story most of the time.  The pacing was uneven, especially in the first half.  And at times things happened that made little to no sense in the context of the story.  Everything here paid off perfectly, and I'm not sure what I would suggest be cut.  But my biggest struggle reading the book was getting through the seemingly random parts that were slowing things down until I understood just how it all came together.

Normally, I try to read books in order.  I worried about that a little since this is the second book in the series, but it didn't turn out to be an issue at all.  There were some references to what I suspect happened in the first book, but not enough to spoil things.  And I quickly got caught up on who everyone was.

Pacing issues aside, The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu was an enjoyable read with a nice mystery.  Fans of mysteries looking for something slightly different should definitely check it out.