The Lazarus Effect: A Vee Johnson Mystery

Vee Johnson is an investigative journalist at a Cape Town magazine called Urban. A photograph of a girl who looks familiar, seen at a local hospital, sets her off on an inquiry that she covers by proposing an article about missing children. The girl she is looking for is Jacqui Paulsen, who left home two years earlier and has not been seen since.

Vee does not work alone. Her assistant, Chloe Bishop, is an unconventional partner, and the pair begin pulling at threads that lead into two fractured households, the Fouries and the Paulsens. Both families hold secrets, and the search for one missing young woman keeps running into relatives who would rather leave old questions closed. The cover story about missing children shapes how Vee is able to ask her questions.

This is the opening book in the Vee Johnson series and the debut novel of H.J. Golakai, a Liberian writer. It belongs to a growing body of crime fiction set in African cities, and its themes gather around disappearance, strained family loyalty, and the reasons people bury painful truths.