Slavery, Jealousy and Ju-Ju

Audrey Thomas has an impressive body of work, more than 16 books, several set in Africa. Some have provocative narrators, but none is as intriguing as Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known as Letty, who narrates her own story from beyond the grave in Local Customs, Thomas’s latest book. “I can speak freely now that I am dead,” she tells us.

Thomas uses some wonderfully augmented facts from the life of the real Letitia Landon, a 19th-century English poet and writer. Other characters in Local Customs are also drawn from history: Captain George Maclean, governor of Cape Coast Castle, on the Guinea Coast; Brodie Cruickshank, another Scotsman in Africa, who becomes Letty’s “cavalier,” and Thomas Birch Freeman, a Wesleyan missionary of mixed race.

In her afterword Thomas tells us that the genesis of the book came in the mid 1960s when she visited the Gold Coast and saw the graves of George and Letitia Maclean. Thomas’s guide said she was “a famous...