![]() agent whose past failures have him single-mindedly intent on capturing the pair. ![]() Mel watches from the sidelines, bitter that the ruin he’s made of his life is further complicated by his fiancée’s infatuation with the captivating Kwesi. They join a popular - and handsome - highlife musician named Kwesi on the road a will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic ensues as Bernadette and Kwesi circle each other, their connection taking on a mystical significance that proves impossible for either to ignore. Mel hopes that President Nkrumah of Ghana, with whom Mel studied in college years before, will offer them sanctuary. The Black American couple have arrived in Africa after an initially unexplained incident in Alabama forces them to flee. It’s clever, if not especially subtle, foreshadowing of the violence that will stalk the young couple as they speed across Ghana, seeking safety in a country on the verge of a coup. “She had feared this day would come, yet nothing could prepare her for it.” But Bernadette need not fear, yet, for the explosion that wakes her is the sound of jubilant Ghanaians celebrating the New Year. In 1966, the young, beautiful Bernadette awakes in Accra to the sound of gunfire and believes that her fiancé, Melvin, has shot himself. Blitz Bazawule’s vibrant, funny thriller THE SCENT OF BURNT FLOWERS (235 pp., Ballantine, $27) begins, quite literally, with a bang.
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