“Dear Sir or Madam…”

Will Ferguson’s third novel, 419, opens with a bang. In Calgary, a car hurtles over an embankment and crashes, killing its sole occupant. The accident puzzles the investigating officer. The action shifts to Lagos, Nigeria, where a police inspector is trying to make sense of Laura, a tense young woman who has just flown in from Canada. She claims to be a tourist. Why hasn’t she brought a camera? The inspector gives Laura an oblique warning. “Visitors so often worry about lions, but it’s the hyenas of this world one needs to watch for.” We next meet a boy fishing with his father, the first of the novel’s many sages and seers. “We live in a wet net,” the fisherman tells his son. “We are caught in it as surely as the catfish and prawns.” The dead man in the flattened car is Laura’s father, Henry Curtis, a retired teacher who has spent long, solitary hours surfing the internet. The death is ruled a suicide. The family’s bank accounts are empty.

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