Jo Beckett analyzes the minds of the dead. She’s a forensic psychiatrist who performs psychological autopsies in cases of equivocal death. When the police and medical examiner can’t determine why someone has died, Jo digs through the victim’s past to ascertain whether the death was natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide. She calls herself a deadshrinker.

But in The Memory Collector Jo has a live patient. She handles the case as she would a psychological autopsy because Ian Kanan has short-term memory loss and can’t tell her what’s happened to him.

Anterograde amnesia—short-term memory loss—leaves old memories intact but destroys the ability to form new ones. Ian Kanan remembers everything about his life, right up until he suffers a brain injury. Thereafter, nothing sticks in his mind. Every few minutes, all the information he’s just gathered, all memory of his current experiences, simply fades. He can’t learn anything new. He can’t remember where he is or what he’s doing.

The idea for Kanan, the security contractor whose short-term memory has been destroyed, grew out of my brother’s true life experience working with brain-injured people. One man had short-term memory loss caused by a motorcycle crash. Every few minutes the man’s memory would evaporate. No matter how many times my brother saw him, the man always shook hands and introduced himself. At a rock concert, he continually shouted in surprise, “It’s the Grateful Dead!” The man was intelligent and personable. But he couldn’t remember from hour to hour what was going on. He didn’t even realize that he was forgetful.

So I thought: What if Jo were faced with a patient who can’t form new memories—and he’s a dangerous man? All Ian Kanan’s skills and military training, all his lethal abilities, are intact. If he disappears, planning to hunt down his enemies, could Jo track him down? If she found him, how could she stop him? Even if she convinced him to call off his vendetta, within minutes he’d forget, and pick up his gun again.

Then I thought: What if his memory loss is being caused by a contagious agent? What if he can infect others?

That was the genesis of The Memory Collector.

I had been living in the United States many years when I began Wife of the Gods. Originally, I set the story in an imaginary West African land, but a literary agent wondered why I had not used Ghana for the setting. After all, I had once lived there. Ostensibly it was because I had been in the States for so long without returning to Ghana to visit that I wasn’t confident that I could portray the country accurately. On a deeper psychological level, though, I seemed more comfortable with a “Ghana-like” country than the real nation with which I had an emotional link. Was I, for some reason, skirting those emotions?

It then became a matter of re-embracing Ghana. When I finally did so, the writing became plainly more enriching. It was like taking a plunge in the pool and discovering that the water was just fine.

I’ve always had a scientific mind. As a boy growing up in Ghana, I was crisply confident that almost everything in life was of a biological, chemical, physical, psychological or medical nature. In my teens, I chose a science curriculum at school, the path that took me on to the study of medicine.

Outside the cocoon of my scientific convictions, there was an alternative world in Ghana. We sometimes heard about juju, which is a fetish or charm, or the magical powers attributed to such an object. At one point in Accra, Ghana’s capital, there was a lively rumor about a juju “going around” the city and making men impotent. Naturally, this was the stuff of nightmares for any believing human male. My amusement at this story of juju-induced impotence was tinged with disdain.

The comfortable bubble of my scientific world was similar to my family’s socioeconomic status. My brothers and I were the children of two lecturers at the University of Ghana, arguably an ivory tower where life was detached from the common man, woman and child. That was but one example of the inequalities we saw in Ghana. Of course, such contrasts also exist in developed countries, but in emerging nations the disparities, much starker, assault one’s sensibilities.

What does the novel’s title, Wife of the Gods, mean? How does a woman become a wife of the gods? In essence, how does one connect the physical, tangible world with a realm in which gods dwell? For some in Ghana, the answer would be that there is no need to join the two, as they already coexist. Case in point: In the novel, a young woman is murdered and protagonist Detective Darko Dawson soon discovers that some people believe the death is the work of a curse from the gods.