Kenya, Leo (Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira) and Rodolphe’s (Rodolphe Daniel Jacquette) ongoing series of spies, extinct beasts and strange flying lights that is set in the post war British colony reaches its fourth book, Interventions, translated from the French and published by Cinebook.
The previous book relocated the action to the shores of Lake Victoria where British agent Kathy Austin and American writer John Remington have been captured by a Soviet team who are in league with the albino Irmanius. Realising that they must work together to solve the mystery, Kathy and Irmanius dive in the lake at a point on the Soviet’s map that indicates there may be items located. These turn out to be numerous boxes, one of which when returned to land opens to reveal what they believe to be a live Mesozoic mammal. As cute as the mammal is a storm quickly reveals that the hill they are camped beside is another one of the boxes, a box that this time is the size of a house and that is beginning to open.
Meanwhile Count Di Broglie and Judith Foster, in their attempt to drive to the lake, discover the seemingly mad Lord Balmer in a Maasai village who appears to have knowledge of what is in the lake and seemingly links it all to the still mysterious flying lights.
With the change of location Leo and Rodolphe, who are both credited for script and art, return the Kenya story to its cold war spy roots as they ramp up the tensions between the Western and Soviet factions. The Doowey, as they name the small mammal, shows that not all the mysterious and supposedly extinct creatures are large or vicious, but it proves to be a plot point that merely lures the reader into a false sense of security before something larger and also something more mysterious are added to the mix.
Kenya – Interventions continues to tantalise over the origins of the series’ extinct beasts and a possibly extra-terrestrial solution to the mystery without, as ever, really giving too much away. With the story due to conclude in the next book, I do wonder just how much of all this will actually get explained to the reader and how much we will be left to ponder on. Yet, as ever with Kenya, such concerns only serve to tantalise and make me all the keener to read the next book in the series.
• There are more details of Kenya on the Cinebook website
• There are more details of the original French Kenya series on the Dargaud website
• The previous books in the Kenya series are Apparitions, Encounters and Aberrations
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