The Coral diviner
Benin City, 1895. Adesuwa Eghosa reads cowries in the market square, inheriting both her mother's gift and her mother's disgrace. Iyeman Eghosa was cast out of the palace's inner court fifteen years ago for reasons no one would ever explain. When master bronze-caster Idehen is found dead among his molds with the Ivie-Oba, the Oba's sacred coral regalia, shattered beside him, the palace has one moon to solve it: the anniversary rites are coming, and a British trade delegation is already asking pointed questions about what treasures Benin still holds.
Captain Osaretin Ediae, the Iyase's son, gets six days of nothing. At the chief priest's insistence and over Osaretin's open scepticism. Adesuwa is brought into the workshop, where she reads what his evidence can't: no fear in the room, only argument. Idehen knew his killer, and the killer left through a door only an insider would use.
Their investigation uncovers not a robbery but a year-long haemorrhage: fourteen treasury "restoration orders" in eleven months, all bearing the seal of Chief Iyoha, the Keeper of the Treasury, and the uncle who raised Osaretin after his mother's death. Idehen had been quietly weighing pieces, suspecting substitutions, and was due to bring it to the Oba directly the morning after he died. At the far end of the chain sits Aldous Kerr, a British trade agent buying palace antiquities through a river trader.
As Adesuwa and Osaretin fall for each other across an unbridgeable rank divide, the palace closes ranks: a fifteen-year-old apprentice is framed, Adesuwa is dragged before a hostile priestly council, and a coral bead is left on her mother's divining cloth as a warning. Osaretin stakes his standing before the full court to defend her, and they finish the case as outsiders working the alleys instead of the offices intercepting Iyoha's next shipment on the river with his own ledger inside.
Iyoha doesn't deny it. He argues he was selling what the British would seize anyway, building a fund to outlast an invasion he sees coming and admits he never intended to kill Idehen, only to reason with him. He's exiled, stripped of title. The coral is repaired with bronze beads where real coral couldn't be recovered, and the rites proceed unblemished before the delegation. Eleven pieces are already gone forever, bound for glass cases abroad. Adesuwa accepts a court appointment as consultant to the priesthood on condition she keeps her market stall and she and Osaretin end the book together, with a foreign ship still at anchor in the harbour.