Blood and Fire Book

PROTAGONIST: Inspector Daniel Jouma; fishing skipper Jake Moore
SETTING: Mombasa, Kenya
SERIES: #2 of 2
RATING: 3.0

WHY:
There seems to be a crime wave underway in Mombasa, Kenya. When a man falls off a building in the main part of the city, Inspector Daniel Jouma is assigned to investigate. At the same time, one of the local nuns, Sister Gudrun, has gone missing. The powers that be have removed Jouma from that case, which is now being handled by his novice deputy, DC David Mwangi. Neither man has any idea of the horror that either of the victims has experienced nor the chilling background that has driven the villain to act so heinously.

At the same time, Jouma's friend, Jake Moore, who is a fishing boat skipper, is involved in adventures of his own. His love interest and financial backer has been murdered. She is a victim of an assassin known only as "The Ghost". At the moment, Jake is involved in a crusade to stop a greedy hotel developer from taking over a poor village to build a mega resort. Although the head of the Spurling family is an honorable man, he is killed and his holdings taken over by his drug addled and hedonistic son, Bobby Spurling. And The Ghost continues to kill.

As you can see from this bare-bones description, there is a lot going on with not a lot of connection between the various narrative elements. I found BLOOD AND FIRE difficult to read because it lacked focus. There were at least five different subplots involving Jouma, Mwangi, Moore, the Spurling family and the FBI. Although some of the threads intersected, they were never woven into a complete whole. As a result, the book lacked cohesion and did not maintain my interest. Add to that a conclusion that showed the skilled assassin being utterly stupid, and you can see why this book didn't work well for me. On a positive note, Brownlee did a great job of depicting the Kenyan setting.