Kwei Quartey Books in Order

If you want the Darko Dawson books from the beginning: Wife of the Gods → Children of the Street → Murder at Cape Three Points
If you want the Emma Djan series in order: The Missing American → Sleep Well, My Lady → Last Seen in Lapaz → The Whitewashed Tombs
If you want a shorter standalone mystery: Death at the Voyager Hotel
If you want something outside the crime novels: Kamila

Kwei Quartey was born in Accra, Ghana, and grew up on the campus of the University of Ghana, where both of his parents were lecturers. His father was Ghanaian, his mother was Black American, and he has said their home was packed with books, especially crime novels.

He started making up stories young, around eight or nine, and even made covers for his homemade books.

Those early reading years mattered. He grew up on writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and you can still feel that old love of clues and motive in the way his mysteries are built. The difference is that Quartey sets those puzzles inside very specific places and social worlds.

As a teenager, medicine took over. He began studying at the University of Ghana Medical School, but after his father died, his family moved to the United States. He went on to Howard University in Washington, DC, trained in internal medicine, and built a career as a physician in Southern California.

Writing returned more slowly. After residency, he took a UCLA Extension creative writing course and joined a weekly writing group. For years he balanced both careers at once, waking early to write before heading to the clinic. It is a practical origin story, which somehow fits him.

That double life lasted a long time.

His breakout novel, Wife of the Gods, appeared in 2009 and introduced Inspector Darko Dawson, a detective in Ghana whose cases move between city life, village customs, family strain, and official corruption. The book made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, and the following year he was voted Best Male Author by the G.O.G. National Book Club. Quartey followed it with Children of the Street, Murder at Cape Three Points, Gold of Our Fathers, and Death by His Grace, building a series that readers often come to for the mystery and stay for the fully lived-in picture of Ghana.

In 2020 he started again with a new lead, Emma Djan, a young private investigator in Accra. The Missing American sends Emma into the world of online scams, fetish priests, and political rot after an American widower vanishes in Ghana. That novel was nominated for an Edgar Award and won the 2021 Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel. Emma returns in Sleep Well, My Lady, Last Seen in Lapaz, and The Whitewashed Tombs, books that take on celebrity culture, trafficking, and anti-LGBTQ violence without losing the snap of a good case.

Across both series, Quartey keeps circling the same questions. How does power really work? What happens when modern institutions collide with older beliefs, or when decent people are pushed into bad choices by money, grief, fear, or family duty? He writes crime novels, but the crimes are never floating in empty space. They grow out of neighborhoods, jobs, faith, politics, and the ordinary bargains people make every day.

These days he lives in Pasadena, California, and since retiring from medicine in 2018 he has written full time. He has also said he enjoys riding horses. That detail feels right somehow. His books are observant, steady, and patient, written by someone who has spent a lot of time watching how people talk, hide things, and carry on.