The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener is a novel by the British writer John le Carre, published in 2001. It is a thriller about the death of an activist in Kenya and her husband's search for who was responsible, and it was adapted into a film in 2005.

Tessa Quayle is murdered beside a lake in northern Kenya, and the doctor who had been travelling with her, whom the newspapers call her lover, has disappeared from the scene. Her husband Justin is much older than Tessa and, by his own account, not a man who chases things; he holds a post at the British High Commission in Nairobi.

Justin resigns from the diplomatic service and begins looking into who killed his wife and why, following her papers and her contacts into the world of aid agencies and pharmaceutical companies working in Africa. What he finds is a conspiracy built out of bureaucracy and drug money.

The plot was loosely based on a real case in Kano, Nigeria, and le Carre uses it to examine what governments and companies were willing to overlook there. It is a standalone novel.