Best Served Cold

Mike is a Nigerian-born lawyer turned investment banker in the City of London. Despite career and financial success, he is not wholly happy with his job and his life. A chance encounter at the theatre with an old school friend launches him on a second career of public service back home in Nigeria. In addition to finding contentment in doing a worthwhile job, he also finds love, and marries Ronke, a fellow returnee from the UK, with whom he starts a family. The trouble begins when he refuses to indulge in the standard Nigerian game of bending rules and cutting corners on a big Ports privatization project in which his erstwhile boss, a former Minister who successfully runs for election as a State Governor, has an interest. The Governor’s shadowy financial backers take a dim view of this, and decide to teach Mike a lesson in the realities of politics and business in Nigeria; it goes horribly wrong, and Mike’s wife and twin son and daughter end up dead. With the help of two maverick members of a shadowy elite unit within the Nigeria Police, Mike sets out to bring his family’s killers to justice. But how does one reach a serving Governor with immunity from prosecution, and the shadowy business and criminal community with whom he’s entwined? Mike and his friends develop a plan to do just that, that takes the story at a fast past pace through various parts of Nigeria, via Dubai and several parts of the USA, to the final denouement in a New York courtroom.

It is a story about Mike, a Nigerian-born lawyer turned investment banker in the City of London. Despite career and financial success, he is not wholly happy with his job and his life. A chance encounter at the theatre with an old school friend launches him on a second career of public service back home in Nigeria. In addition to finding contentment in doing a worthwhile job, he also finds love, and marries Ronke, a fellow returnee from the UK, with whom he starts a family. The trouble begins when he refuses to indulge in the standard Nigerian game of bending rules and cutting corners on a big Ports privatization project in which his erstwhile boss, a former Minister who successfully runs for election as a State Governor, has an interest. The Governor’s shadowy financial backers take a dim view of this, and decide to teach Mike a lesson in the realities of politics and business in Nigeria; it goes horribly wrong, and Mike’s wife and twin son and daughter end up dead. With the help of two maverick members of a shadowy elite unit within the Nigeria Police, Mike sets out to bring his family’s killers to justice. But how does one reach a serving Governor with immunity from prosecution, and the shadowy business and criminal community with whom he’s entwined? Mike and his friends develop a plan to do just that, that takes the story at a fast past pace through various parts of Nigeria, via Dubai and several parts of the USA, to the final denouement in a New York courtroom.

Born and brought up in Ibadan, Nigeria, Akintunde attended medical school in Nigeria, and after a stint of service with the Nigerian Army, relocated to the United Kingdom in the late 1980s, and over the next quarter of a century combined service in the British Army Reserve with postgraduate training as a forensic psychiatrist, earning a Law degree along the way. The proud, and increasingly broke father of 4 daughters, this is his first book, which he hopes will be the start of a fourth career as a writer, as his military, legal and medical careers gently wind down. He is, somewhat to his own surprise, at work on his second book, A Brief Political History of the Nigerian Army.