Children of the Street
Read Children of the Street Online
Authors: Kwei Quartey
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #African American
PRAISE FOR
Wife of the Gods
“[A]n absolute gem of a first novel and the sort of book that will delight not only hard-core mystery fans, but also those who visit the genre only casually in search of an occasional literary entertainment …
Wife of the Gods
is not simply an extraordinarily well-crafted mystery; it’s also an extremely well-structured and deftly written novel.… [Quartey] has a remarkable ability to credibly evoke the simultaneity of the modern and deeply traditional worlds in which so many of that continent’s people coexist.” —
Los Angeles Times
“Like
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
suspense novels? You’ll love
Wife of the Gods.
”
—Essence
“
Wife of the Gods
is a lush and well-written tale of murder most foul, set in an alien landscape, but laced with many of the same motivations and alibis you might expect to find much closer to home.”
—BookPage
“Already garnering unusual critical acclaim for a debut novel, Quartey’s remarkable characters give the reader a worthy whodunit.”
—Ebony
“Move over Alexander McCall Smith. Ghana has joined Botswana on the map of mystery.… [This] newcomer is most welcome.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Crisp, engrossing…[Quartey] renders a compelling cast of characters inhabiting a world precariously perched between old and new. Fans of McCall Smith’s
No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
will relish the opportunity to discover yet another intriguing area of Africa.” —
Booklist
(starred)
“[A] winning debut … Dawson is a wonderful creation, a man as rich with contradictions as the Ghana Quartey so delightfully evokes.… Readers will be eager for the next installment in what one hopes will be a long series.” —
Publishers Weekly
ALSO BY KWEI QUARTEY
Wife of the Gods
Children of the Street
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Random House Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2011 by Kwei J. Quartey
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
T
RADE
P
APERBACKS
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Quartey, Kwei J.
Children of the street: a novel / Kwei Quartey.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60411-2
1. Police—Ghana—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
3. Ghana—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3617.U37C47 2011
813′.6—dc22
2010026476
www.atrandom.com
Cover design: Joe Montgomery
Cover images: Jason R. Warren/iStockphoto (children), Alan Tobey/iStockphoto (border)
v3.1
To all those who dare to care
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Prologue
A day shy of his seventeenth birthday, Musa was a boy with the survival instincts of a grown man. Blood sprang from the stab wound in his back, but he did not die instantly. As his life drained, Musa had a running vision, like a video, of his short life. Life in his small hometown of Gurungu had been a depressing, losing battle as his family tried to grow millet in the unforgivable desert conditions of northern Ghana. It was what had pushed him to his seven-day trek to Ghana’s capital city of smooth motorways and impenetrable traffic jams.
Penniless and lonely, Musa hadn’t known a soul in Accra. With no education, no family connections, and no skills, he could hope for only a few jobs. He could be a street vendor, a luggage porter at a lorry park, a shoeshine boy, or a truck pusher—one of those guys who roams Accra with carts picking up metal scraps to take to the junkyards. He earned much less than a
cedi
a day.
Up before dawn, Musa never rested until after nightfall, laying his head down on city pavements, at storefronts, and around marketplaces. He had only wanted his life to get better. He had sworn that, after working in Accra for a year, he would go back to Gurungu with new clothes and some money for his mother.
As Musa’s eyelids fluttered closed, he must have wondered if this was what his father had meant when he had shaken a warning finger in Musa’s face.
If you go to Accra, you will become nothing but a street child, and you will pay a terrible price for it
.
