Keeper of the Susu Pot

About this book:

In the heart of West End, Mama Tess has guarded the community's *susu* for three decades—a rotating savings pot built on nothing but trust, shame, and the weight of forty-two folded notes in a rusted blue tin. Every Friday, twenty-four market women, taxi drivers, and tradespeople lay their hard-won cedis in her palm, knowing the pot will see them through a leaking roof, a tuition bill, a medical emergency. But when the tin vanishes from its hiding place behind the wardrobe, the fragile peace of the compound shatters. The tailor needs money for cloth before his creditors strip his machine. The internet booth boy runs through midnight rain with a black sack. A brother-in-law circles a niece's payout like a vulture. And Mama Tess, keeper of everyone's secrets, must find the thief before the street's own brutal justice takes over.

With the lyrical grit of a market dawn and the taut suspense of a locked-room mystery, *Keeper of the Susu Pot* plunges into a world where a stolen pot isn't just theft—it's a rupture in the social fabric that holds a community together. As suspicion spreads like harmattan dust and old alliances fracture, Mama Tess navigates a labyrinth of lies, debts, and buried histories, knowing that in West End, the truth has many prices, and some debts are paid in blood.