Lois 's Reviews > Last Seen in Lapaz

This was excellent and a bit weighty.
What I love about this series ultimately is its style. The setup for this series is cozy mystery-esque or maybe cozy mystery adjacent🤔? Either way, this manages to include my favorite aspect of cozy mysteries: the quirky cast of endearing characters that people each novel. This includes Emma's co-workers at the detective agency as well as her awesome boss. I like her mom's character and their relationship. There's Courage her bf, Boateng (sp? I listened to this on audio, so I have no idea of the sp) the forensics guy and the Cuban doctor whose name continually escapes me. So, even though these characters aren't a huge part of the story, I've come to look forward to their scenes.

I also adore the settings in this series, which I've read out of order and won't go into specifics as I don't remember exactly which book on the series I'm thinking of and don't want to risk spoiling the 4th book in this series which I read first. I just find the settings interesting, and the descriptions leave me longing to visit Accra.

The other part I love about this series is the way the story is laid out. While Emma is the protagonist in the series and in each book, the reader is given the ability to see many aspects that are occurring all around the crime. I think of this as kind of the Law & Order effect. So the reader gets scenes sometimes before the mystery incident, sometimes scenes with victims of the mystery incident, its a very thorough look at the situation. The mysteries themselves tend to be complex and nuanced. The perpetrator is rarely the obvious suspect. This approach to setting the mystery in the middle of a hedge maze and allowing the reader to use the clues as a map to the center is possibly my favorite aspect of these stories.

Finally, I like that the author isn't afraid to look at issues that impact the world globally but allows the reader to see a Ghanaian point of view on these issues. This is a pov not often considered or seen. I find it especially effective in this book and book 4. It was just really well played and respectfully handled.