James Nicoll Reviews

2022’s A Quiet Teacher is the first of Adam Oyebanji’s Quiet Teacher mystery series.

To the students and staff at Pittsburgh’s prestigious Calderhill Academy, Greg Abimbola is a language teacher whose good looks are made piratical by his eyepatch. Staff and students might be surprised to learn that Greg Abimbola is not the teacher’s real name and that his skill set extends far beyond teaching spoiled children Russian.

Calderhill caters to wealthy, upper-caste Americans little accustomed to hearing no. Many of their children are spoiled and racist. Senior management evinces only tepid discomfort at how certain members of staff are treated by parents and their children. The management is well aware of the source of their salary.

Case in point: the Delcades. Lindsay Delcade is determined that her daughter Vicki enjoy the grand career Lindsay left behind when she married Bryan Delcade. Step one is getting Vicki into Stayard College. Vicki’s B in Russian imperils Vicki’s chances of getting in. Clearly, the grade must be because Greg resents white people, not because Vicki is a B student.

Another case: ambitious politician Bryan wants to protect his failson Chandler from consequences. Greg exposed Chandler as the kid who carved the N‑word into Greg’s model ship. Rather than try to have Chandler expelled — too much paperwork and unlikely to succeed — Greg simply imposed detention. Even that was too much for Bryan, who cannot see why a lavish cash donation would not suffice to erase any hurt.

Lindsay Delcade’s relentless efforts to make everyone else miserable are cut short when she is brutally murdered. Office suspicion falls on assistant custodian Andrea Velasquez. Lindsay was stabbed with a screwdriver (with Andrea’s prints on it) in the custodian’s room that Andrea uses. Also, Andrea’s alibi is an easily disproven lie.

Greg is certain that Andrea isn’t the killer. It seems likely someone else on staff must be. It’s a puzzle that an ordinary language teacher likely could not work out. Greg on the other hand is a retired spy and he has access to resources that even the police might find hard to match.

There’s just one little flaw in Greg’s plan. He contacts a former colleague for help. That colleague passes on the information that Greg is still alive to another former colleague, retired GRU officer Morosov. Morosov blames the end of his GRU career and the gruesome death of his brother on double-agent Greg.

While Greg carefully constructs a case against a killer, Morosov plots Greg’s unpleasant demise.

~oOo~

This seems to be yet another case of James Sets Out To Read One Thing and Then Reads Something Else. I meant to read the author’s upcoming Esperance but convinced myself I didn’t have an ARC for it, (which in fact I did). I did have A Quiet Teacher, so I read that instead. It turned out that I was in the mood for a cozy-adjacent murder mystery after all. I will fit Esperance into the schedule later in the month.

While the differences far outweigh similarities, I was struck by the parallels between Oyebanji’s Greg Abimbola and John Brunner’s Max Curfew. Both are black, both spies, both worked for the Russians and the British, both retired, both deal with racism over and over. As I’ve never met anyone else who’d even heard of the Max Curfew novels, I’d credit the superficial similarities to chance… except that the author’s site makes it clear he’s widely read in older SF and presumably SF adjacent material. So maybe two people on Earth read the Max Curfew books?

Differences: Max retired because he was disillusioned, whereas Greg had no choice, what with the whole ​“exposed as a double-agent working for the British.” Why he felt he had to work for the UK is a bit of a spoiler so all I will say is that it was the espionage version of Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, people forced to turn on their nation because circumstances made the alternative appear worse¹. Plus of course, Brunner was white while Oyebanji is black, so one of the authors is interrogating their subject from a more informed perspective.

The novel depicts the US as a paradise of corrupt, spoiled racist oligarchs, their forelocking-tugging enablers, and the unfortunates whose livelihoods force them to deal with the oligarchs and enablers². It’s interesting that the police detectives don’t quite fit the pattern. It would be very convenient for them if Andrea were guilty, but when evidence points elsewhere, they consider it³.

A Quiet Teacher was not the book I set out to read. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the novel, more for the mystery elements and character interactions than the espionage subplot. Readers who enjoy it will be pleased to know that there is a sequel.

A Quiet Teacher is available here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

Publisher Severn House does list A Quiet Teacher but I don’t know that it is possible to buy the novel directly from them.

I could not find A Quiet Teacher at Bookshop UK, for some reason.

1: On a somewhat related note, Greg’s former bosses berate him at one point for messing up a cunning scheme of theirs about which Greg had been kept in the dark (for no especially compelling reason, as the plan involved Greg).

2: USA delenda est. Not that Russia comes off any better.

3: Maybe that implausible detail qualifies this as SF, as might the care UK intelligence takes for the well-being of an agent whose services were no longer needed.