Good Reads meta-data is 224 pages rated 3.40 by 104 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Kenya.
Verdict: Atmospheric.
Tagline: Ouch!
Colonial Kenya in the late 1930s is the setting. Our investigator is a Canadian who wanted to see the world and entered the Empire’s colonial service. He is sent from the capital to a farming community to monitor some local Germans.
These Germans were the descendants of the colonists of German East Africa which passed to the English in 1919. When Germany’s African colonies changed hands, some of the colonial Germans preferred to move to Boer areas in South Africa. Others went to Kenya. Wherever they live, they were hostile to the British, and so London keeps an eye on them, and that eye in this story is the Canadian.
Members of this German diaspora stick together in tight communities, and these are being courted, infiltrated, or manipulated by Nazis. Remember the time is slightly pre-war. The activities are legal, but….
Then even as investigator imbibes a G and T, the local German leader dies. Then other things happen, and the plot gets thick. Very. The farming community is surrounded by jungle, and that adds to the brew. There are many natives about but they play no role in the white mischief.
***
Huxley wrote two more krimis, and I will pursue them. I got this one on EBay and it is a large print edition culled from the Library of South Australia. I found it hard to read, because I am not used to such large print which made it harder for me. Strange but true. The large print adds a third to the book’s length
The author was born and raised in Kenya and published many other books, some autobiographical. And also one about the coming of the Europeans to Africa from a native perspective. I might read that one, too.