‘Esperance’: Aliens Out of Africa

It takes a certain type of bravery, or perhaps just courage of your convictions, to save a prized piece of historical research until the final reveal of a novel. Perhaps when it’s your fourth novel, though, you have a little bit more confidence. And indeed, in Esperance, Adam Oyebanji does manage to keep the suspense intact and the information compelling.

Oyebanji’s 2022 Braking Day took place on generation ships that take centuries to fly across the galaxy. It was a finalist for the Canopus Award, which honors writing about interstellar travel. Though Esperance shares a genre with that sci-fi publication, as an Earth-bound murder novel, Oyebanji’s new work has more in common with his two A Quiet Teacher whodunnits. 

On his website, Oyebanji notes that he has “a knack for writing mysteries.” While Braking Day concerned itself with investigating the cultural imperatives of long-term spaceship cultures, Esperance sets up a criminal mystery for the Chicago PD. 

The story opens with Detective Ethan Krol investigating a perplexing double homicide of a drowned father and son. Not so strange, but place the bodies next to a barracuda on the 20th floor of a high-rise and it all looks odder. Discover that the fluid in their lungs is seawater, despite the high-rise’s location near the fresh-water Lake Michigan, and the detective’s work is clear.

The book follows two protagonists: Krol and Abidemi Eniola. Krol is raw from divorce and spends the book not telling his daughter whether he can attend her wedding. She assumes he disapproves of her Black fiance, whereas actually he can’t bring himself to tell her about the brain tumor that he believes will kill him before the ceremony.

Eniola is quite a different proposition. A seemingly young “onyx Black” woman, she stands (and runs and jumps) in contradistinction to both the unhealthy short white Goth she befriends and the out-of-shape middle-age cop. “Abi” as Hollie Rogers calls her, is an odd combination. She accepts being called Nigerian, although she’s not quite African; she’s not quite alien despite her alien-seeming tech and she’s not quite an English speaker, with her bizarre diction reminiscent of a pre-Hays Code gangster. 

In one of the central racial juxtapositions that reappear consistently throughout the book, Abi befriends the white Rogers after asking her for help in the alien surroundings of West England and, despite misgivings, adopts her as a sidekick.

Krol, Eniola, and Rogers keep ending up in the same transatlantic locations. Moving separately, they arrive in cities where crimes have been – or are about to be – committed. When they arrive, who else is around and how they relate to the crimes are all crucial clues in understanding, finally, what is going on.

The action takes place in Chicago, in Rhode Island, in Bristol, England, and around Edinburgh, Scotland, but the frame is triangular. Though no events take place in Africa, characters make sly Nigerian references and there is a consistent African undercurrent to the book, especially in its themes of identity, exile, and layered history. This is a novel of cops, families, racial tensions, and cultural legacies—where science fiction becomes the frame to expose historical truths.

The result is a puzzle whose solution doesn’t just resolve a murder, but shines a light on the haunting legacies of the past. Esperance is a compelling genre hybrid: part science fiction, part historical fiction, all delivered at the tempo of a gripping detective mystery.