Amazon.com (ISBN 0679457445, Hardcover)

Readers familiar with Isak Dinesen's classic memoir of colonial life in Africa, Out of Africa, will instantly recognize Richard Wiley's witty riff on its famous first line at the beginning of Ahmed's Revenge. Like Dinesen, narrator Nora Grant is a white woman living on a coffee ranch in Kenya; like her, Grant's husband is shot in the second chapter of this fictional "memoir," but there the similarities end, and Wiley takes off on a wild ride through the cutthroat world of ivory poachers and international smugglers. Set in the early 1970s, Ahmed's Revenge is Nora's account of her husband's murder and her own subsequent investigation into it. Born in Kenya, Nora had left Africa for London, where she met and married Julius. When he suggests they return to Kenya and make a go of coffee farming, she agrees, and for a time they are successful. Then Julius is killed and Nora discovers he was in league with ivory smugglers. As she begins to look into her husband's shady dealings, Nora uncovers more than she'd bargained for: not only was Julius involved in the illegal ivory trade, but her father, once a minister of wildlife in the Kenyan government, was, too.

The plot alone would make Ahmed's Revenge a compelling read, but Wiley isn't content just to deliver a mystery. As Nora delves into the truth behind her husband's death, Wiley serves up a disquieting meditation on issues of race, culture, and national identity. A note to the worried: Ahmed's Revenge is not the Kenyan version of that well-known retribution against careless tourists taken by Montezuma; it is a reference to a giant elephant whose skeleton graces the National Museum in Nairobi. It seems only appropriate that his bones serve as the frame around which Wiley builds his fascinating, unpredictable novel.