There are books you read, smile at, and neatly shelve away. Then there are books that drag you by the collar, hurl you into their world, and refuse to let go until you’re gasping. Leye Adenle’s Easy Motion Tourist belongs firmly in the latter camp.
From its very first page, the novel sets the tone with a mutilated body tossed into Lagos’s buzzing nightlife. This is a jarring introduction that signals this won’t be a polite story. Instead, it’s a raw plunge into the city’s darkest corners, where violence, corruption, and hypocrisy co-exist with resilience, humour, and human connection. Reading it felt less like flipping through a thriller and more like surviving a Lagos night: disorienting, dangerous, and unforgettable.
The protagonist, Guy Collins, is a British journalist hoping to cover Nigeria’s elections. He makes what seems like a harmless decision to wander into a Victoria Island bar, but before long, he’s arrested near a crime scene and finds himself stewing in a police cell, clueless and terrified. Wrong place, wrong time, and wrong skin colour. His curiosity, too much for his own good, has landed him squarely in Lagos trouble.
Enter Amaka. She’s bold, relentless, and fiercely protective of the city’s sex workers, who often suffer violence in silence. Amaka mistakes Guy for a high-profile BBC correspondent and ropes him into her crusade to expose the ritual killings and body-parts trade that haunt the city. From that point on, their fates are tangled together: the bumbling outsider trying to find his feet, and the sharp-tongued Lagosian woman who already knows the stakes.
Guy is often infuriating in his cluelessness. Sometimes, his wide-eyed foreigner routine tested my patience, but he also provides a lens for readers unfamiliar with Lagos’s chaos. Amaka, on the other hand, is unforgettable. She is at once flawed, stubborn, and magnetic. If Guy represents the outsider’s view, Amaka is Lagos, as she is fierce, layered, maddening, and impossible to ignore.
What makes Easy Motion Tourist so arresting isn’t just its plot but the city itself. Adenle doesn’t sanitise Lagos for international readers. He doesn’t explain away the pidgin or dilute the slang. He lets the city breathe on the page, messy, loud, and unapologetic.
The Lagos I found in this novel felt achingly familiar: the segregation between rich neighbourhoods shielded by gates and the rest of the city left to fend for itself; the police cells that are more like holding pens for those “awaiting trial” indefinitely; the everyday hustle where justice is something you buy, and survival is the only real victory. At times, I laughed at the dark humour threaded through the narrative because that’s Lagos too: a place where people joke even when the world is falling apart. At other times, I found myself angry and unsettled.
There’s a line in the novel that struck me: “the case of Okafor Bright Chikezie lingered in the classification of ‘awaiting trial’, a concept used by the Nigerian police when they don’t want to let a suspect go to court or go free.” Anyone familiar with Nigeria’s justice system knows how depressingly accurate that is. Adenle’s fiction is entertaining, yes, but it’s also reportage in disguise.
One thing I couldn’t ignore was the way Adenle confronts gender-based violence head-on. The mutilated body in the story isn’t a mere plot device; it is a chilling reminder of the reality many women face. The novel forces readers to sit with uncomfortable truths about ritual killings, exploitation, and how society casually discards sex workers.
There’s a moment when the police arrest a group of women simply for being on the street, holding them until they can pay or “settle” with their bodies. Reading that, I felt my stomach turn. It reminded me of how quickly society judges sex workers while ignoring the systemic forces that trap them. Adenle doesn’t lecture, but through Amaka’s mission, he insists we confront these hypocrisies.
As a crime thriller, Easy Motion Tourist is propulsive. The writing is sharp, the dialogue snaps, and the scenes roll out cinematically. You can almost hear the sirens, the barroom chatter, and the grinding of Lagos traffic. Adenle’s screenwriting background shines through: cliffhangers dare you to put the book down, and the humour, dry, sardonic, and perfectly timed, provides relief amid the blood and tension.
But it’s not perfect. Sometimes the violence feels relentless, almost to the point of sensationalism. And Collins, as a character, can wear you thin with his naivety. More than once, I muttered under my breath, “Guy, abeg, try get sense.” Yet, perhaps that’s the point. Lagos devours the unprepared, and Collins becomes a symbol of what happens when innocence collides with brutal reality.
One of the things I admired, but resented at first, was Adenle’s refusal to give us neat conclusions. The ending is messy. Justice doesn’t arrive gift-wrapped. Threads dangle. Some villains walk free. I wanted resolution, but Lagos doesn’t hand out tidy resolutions, and neither does this novel. The more I sat with it, the more I realized the messiness was part of its truth. I found out it has a sequel, so I’m definitely reading that next.
There’s also a shocking twist that I won’t spoil here, but it left me exclaiming out loud. Adenle knows how to blindside his readers, and even though I saw a few clichés coming, that particular turn left me reeling.
Above all, Amaka lingered long after I closed Easy Motion Tourist. A woman manoeuvring through male-dominated spaces with both empathy and steel, she’s the kind of character I want to see more of in Nigerian literature. She isn’t painted as a saint. She’s stubborn, sometimes abrasive, but she’s fiercely human. Through her, Adenle champions the women society prefers to ignore.
And then there’s Lagos itself, not just as backdrop but as living, breathing chaos. I could hear the pidgin, feel the sweat of traffic jams, smell the street food mingling with exhaust fumes. Adenle captures the contradictions: laughter in despair, corruption alongside resilience, beauty, and rot side by side.
Personally, Easy Motion Tourist dredged up memories of stories we heard while growing up, about ritual killings, about people vanishing and never returning, about money rituals whispered in markets and churches, and splattered on front pages of Newspapers. Those tales were often dismissed as folklore, but Adenle rips off the veil and says, No, this is real, and it’s terrifying. That confrontation shook me, and it’s why this novel feels more than entertainment.
Would I recommend Easy Motion Tourist? Without hesitation, but not as a cozy read. This isn’t a book you read to calm your nerves during leisure. It’s gritty, uncomfortable, and sometimes overwhelming. It will make you laugh, make you fume, and make you think. If you’re looking for a sugar-coated crime novel, look elsewhere. But if you want to understand Lagos beyond the glossy Instagram shots and Afrobeats playlists, this novel is a fearless place to start.
For me, Easy Motion Tourist is more than a thriller. It is a recognition of truths we often bury, a challenge to face the violence and corruption around us, and a reminder that literature has teeth. Adenle doesn’t let you look away, and maybe that’s the real achievement. Lagos is never easy, never straightforward, and neither is this book. But like the city itself, it stays with you long after you’ve put it down.
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