THE COLOUR OF STILL WATER

The Padre Nyekundu Series, Book 1

C. Kamau Waweru

Dira Prime | Dira Ebook Publishing | Nairobi

Nairobi, 2055

Eusebius Odongo was ordained at twenty-three. Defrocked at forty-one. At forty-five, he rides a boda boda through Nairobi and owns one pair of red shoes he bought from a shop on River Road he has never been able to find since.

He did not set out to listen. The seminary trained him to receive confession, and four years after losing the collar, the training has outlived the authority that gave it purpose. People talk to him at the chai kiosk, on the back of the machine, at the stage where the riders wait. They talk because he does not look away and does not interrupt and does not offer the premature absolution that passes, in most conversations, for kindness. He hears what they say. He cannot unhear it.

When a young priest named Tobias Mwenda is found dead at the foot of a parish stairwell in Mathare, the official explanation is that he fell. Eusebius knows better. Not because he has evidence, but because Tobias spent seventeen Thursdays at the counter of Scholastica’s kiosk, drinking tea without sugar, asking questions that began with “Suppose, for the sake of argument” and ended in places the Church could not afford to let him reach.

What follows is not an investigation in any form Eusebius would recognise. It is a listening. A retired parish clerk carries a notebook with a recipe on the cover and thirty years of numbers inside it. A community elder in Mathare opens a green door and lets him in, but only on Thursdays, and only if he has earned the next piece. A canon lawyer who owes him a debt neither of them has named agrees to look at what he has found. A forensic accountant in a converted church in Westlands traces the money from a Pumwani parish to an offshore shell in Mauritius and back again, and the trail passes through land that was taken from families who are still, decades later, waiting.

Between the listening and the reckoning stands Cardinal Francis Kimutai Arap Bett: the man who signed the letter that ended Eusebius’s priesthood, a man of genuine faith and impeccable institutional logic, who believes with complete sincerity that the Church cannot survive every truth at once. He is not wrong about the cost. He is wrong about what can be left buried.

The Colour of Still Water is a novel about a city that acts on the people who live in it, about the distance between what institutions promise and what they protect, and about a man in red shoes who has lost every title he was given and is finding out, one Thursday at a time, what he was actually called to do.

Publication Specifications

Title: The Colour of Still Water

Series: The Padre Nyekundu Series, Book 1

Author: C. Kamau Waweru

Imprint: Dira Prime

Publisher: Dira Ebook Publishing, Nairobi

Genre: Literary Mystery / Speculative Fiction /African Futurism / Fiction

Setting: Nairobi, 2055

Format: A6 phone-screen optimised e-book

Word Count: Approximately 79,000 words

Chapter Count: 45 chapters

First Edition: June, 2026

ISBN: 978-9914-9448-3-9

Format: PDF e-book

Electronic Edition published June 2026