Femi Kayode Books in Order

If you want the full Philip Taiwo arc: Lightseekers → Gaslight
If you want the clearest entry point: Lightseekers
If you like cases about religion, power, and public image: Lightseekers → Gaslight

Femi Kayode grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. He studied psychology at the University of Ibadan and later trained as a clinical psychologist, which helps explain why his fiction pays such close attention to motive, pressure, and the way ordinary people get pulled into terrible choices.

Before he published a novel, he spent more than two decades in advertising. He also created and wrote several primetime TV shows, and his writing credits already included work for stage and screen. That background shows up in his books, which tend to move cleanly, scene by scene, without wasting time.

He took a less direct road to fiction than a lot of debut novelists.

Along the way, he was a Packard Fellow in Film and Media at the University of Southern California and a Gates-Packard Fellow in International Health at the University of Washington, Seattle. Later, he earned an MA in Creative Writing, Crime Fiction at the University of East Anglia, graduating with distinction. While he was there, Lightseekers won the Little, Brown/UEA Crime Fiction Award.

The move into crime fiction was not just a change of job title. Kayode has spoken about his interest in the psychology of mob violence, and Lightseekers grew from that curiosity. Instead of building a standard police procedural, he created Dr. Philip Taiwo, an investigative psychologist who is more interested in why a crime happened than in showing off as a detective.

Lightseekers became his breakout novel. Set around the killing of three students near Port Harcourt, it uses a tense investigation to look at crowd violence, social media, class, corruption, and the strain between public stories and private grief. Readers who connect with it often like the mix of suspense and social observation, and the book was longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger in 2022.

Then came Gaslight, which brings Philip back for a case involving a missing pastor's wife and a powerful megachurch in Ogun State. It widens the lens without losing the human scale. Kayode is still interested in institutions and power, but he keeps the story close to family pressure, reputation, faith, and the quiet calculations people make when truth becomes expensive.

Psychology is the engine.

Across his fiction, he keeps returning to questions about crowd behavior, institutional failure, belonging, and the cost of silence. His settings matter too. Lagos, Port Harcourt, university communities, and church compounds are not just backdrops in these books. They shape the danger, the choices, and even the kind of truth a character can safely tell. Philip Taiwo, who has spent much of his adult life in the United States, often moves through Nigeria as both insider and outsider, and that tension gives the series extra bite.

Kayode now lives in Windhoek, Namibia, with his wife and two sons. Public author profiles have also noted his doctoral work in crime fiction at Bath Spa University. He came to novels after a full life in psychology, television, and advertising, and that late turn feels like part of what makes his work interesting. The books are smart and tense, but they never lose sight of the people inside the pressure.