4 ideas
Guy Collins, a British journalist in Lagos to cover elections, sees the body of a mutilated woman dumped outside a bar and is arrested by police who treat the nearest outsider as a suspect. Amaka, who runs an underground network protecting the city's sex workers, gets him out of custody. She then pulls him into her own investigation of a trade in harvested body parts sold to powerful buyers for ritual purposes.
Poor intermediaries do the killing and harvesting. The victims are those with the least protection, above all sex workers, so the violence flows downward while the demand and money flow from above.
Lagos is shown as a system in which nightlife, policing, politics and informal commerce are gears that turn one another. Each actor behaves rationally within its own incentives: police seek quick arrests or bribes, bar owners want discretion, politicians want advantage. Horror emerges from the combined motion rather than from any single villain.
Sex workers are denied police protection because their work is criminalized and stigmatized. They therefore build their own safety infrastructure: shared intelligence about dangerous clients, warning networks, and a leader willing to confront powerful men. Groups that the state excludes develop parallel institutions that can outperform official ones at investigating crimes against their members.