Lightseekers

By: Femi Kayode

Narrated by: Cary Hite

Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's Summary

Bloomsbury presents Lightseekers by Femi Kayode, read by Cary Hite.

Winner of the 2019 UEA Crime Writing Prize, Lightseekers is the start of a major new crime series introducing investigative psychologist Dr Philip Taiwo.

When three young students are brutally murdered in a Nigerian university town, their killings - and their killers - are caught on social media. The world knows who murdered them; what no one knows is why.

As the legal trial begins, Investigative Psychologist Philip Taiwo is contacted by the father of one of the boys, desperate for some answers to his son's murder. But Philip is an expert in crowd behaviour and violence, not a detective, and after travelling to the sleepy university town that bore witness to the killings, he soon feels dramatically out of his depth.

Will he finally be able to uncover the truth of what happened to the Okiri Three?

©2021 Femi Kayode (P)2021 Hachette Audio

Critic Reviews

"A superb novel - so inventive and so well done. It’s just brilliant." (Harriet Tyce) 

"Gripping, beautifully written and unlike anything else you'll read." (William Ryan)

"What a sensational debut. Confident, beautifully-paced writing. Dr Philip Taiwo is a protagonist I want to meet again, and the setting is so well-drawn. Intelligent, suspenseful and utterly engrossing." (Will Dean)

A detective story with a difference

It was good to read something set in Nigeria, I’ve certainly never read anything modern set anywhere like that. There was a good cast of characters, the main ones well rounded. The story itself was interesting and didn’t involve all the usual things you get in a British who or whydunit. The narration was very good. My only criticism is that it went on a bit too long but then I often think that about books.

Pretty standard

Pretty disappointing. This is a standard detective story, which makes some giant leaps at the end, out of nowhere, in order to bring it to a conclusion. Quite a lot of clichés and clichéd characters, and the female characters are all there as embellishments to the male characters, or vehicles to the male characters' story lines. I listened because it was Waterstones' thriller of the month, but I was not thrilled.

Great slow-burn mystery

For anyone who both likes a procedural and who is interested in the ins and outs of Nigerian culture, seen from the higher echelons of society, this is a fabulous read. I was equally fascinated by the workings of the legal and academic society as I was by the crime story. And the narration was perfection!