12 Best Espionage Movies That Aren’t James Bond

For fans of missing person cases, dual narrators, and past and present stories that collide!

Nicole Oruwari is a British woman of Jamaican decent who married Tonye, a Nigerian man, and moved to Lagos, Nigeria to start a family. This is where she met and became a part of the Nigerwives, a group of foreign women married to Nigerian men. But she doesn’t return after a boat trip, and her aunt Claudine — who raised her — is tired of not getting proper updates and travels to Lagos for the first time to find out what happened to Nicole. Instead of finding a search and rescue team, she finds that no one seems that concerned nor is actively looking for Nicole the way she thinks they should be, including Tonye who apparently is already set to marry someone else…

I loved the look at life in Lagos from the perspective of Nigerians contrasted by the perspective of Nicole, the Nigerwives, and Claudine. Also, as someone who is often disappointed with the ending of books, I really enjoyed this one. I’m excited for the HBO series adaptation and will absolutely pick up anything Vanessa Walters writes next.

The audiobook has two great narrators: Dami Olukoya and Debra Michaels.

(TW mentions of partner abuse, domestic abuse scene/ briefly mentions past suicide, no detail/ mentions past addiction, overdose/ past child sexual abuse)

For fans of Nordic noir!

Retired Detective Konrád is still trying to figure out who murdered his father years ago when elderly grandparents bring him a new case to look into: their granddaughter, a woman they know was smuggling drugs, has now gone missing. Could this disappearance tie into a case of a young girl found dead in a pond? And how?

If you want to start at the beginning, pick up The Darkness Knows.