Category Archives: South Africa

Review: THE FALLEN by Jassy Mackenzie

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This is the first book I have read featuring Jade De Jong, a South African private detective, though it is the third in which she appears. As it opens Jade is in the resort area of St Lucia for a diving holiday with her boyfriend, a policeman. She booked the trip to overcome her fear of diving and to shore up the somewhat rocky relationship with David Patel. But even though she receives private lessons from the instructor she is unable to overcome her fear of drowning and fully embrace the sport and the holiday turns truly rotten when David drops a bombshell about their relationship. Before the two can discuss their future the diving instructor is found stabbed to death and David (with Jade in tow) steps in to help the locals with the investigation.

I found the plot of THE FALLEN uneven, slow to get going really as several threads of unequal interest were set up, including a somewhat confusing tale about Jade trying to find the grave of her mother who died when Jade was a baby. For me the pacing was thrown off by the terribly obvious and drawn out clue-hunting, and then at one point I thought the book had finished and was rather astonished to find there were still 6 and a half chapters (a couple of hours) of the audio book left . The thread that deals with what happens after the diving instructor’s body is found – and the truly horrible plan Jade uncovers – was for me the best part of the book; responsible for a genuine OMG moment when it became clear what was going on.

I should be fair and say that some of my problems with the book are probably not the author’s fault. The fact is I didn’t really take to Jade De Jong. This doesn’t mean she is a poorly drawn character (objectively I can see she is not and is indeed quite realistic) but I couldn’t summon up much interest in whether or not she got out of her various tight spots and near-death experiences. Just as you sometimes meet someone in real life and know you’re never going to be anything other than acquaintances without really knowing why, I just didn’t particularly like the character from the outset. As the book went on I found reasons not to like her, such as her somewhat hypocritical morality which seemed to boil down to the notion that it’s OK to do bad things (such as kill people) as long as the victims are not innocent (as deemed by whoever is doing the killing), but my not liking her preceded me discovering this about her.

I’m not entirely sure this book knew what it wanted to be. At times it read like an old-fashioned whodunnit, though with De Jong making a bit of a fist of the kind of denouement that Holmes or Poirot could perform with aplomb. I cannot possibly, for example, be the only reader to have been internally screaming “there are more than passengers on an airplane you dolt” as Jade very slowly worked this out as if for an audience of dim-witted, third graders. At other times the book read like a modern thriller with loads of action and heroine-in-peril scenarios. Personally I think this aspect of the book worked better, especially as it allowed the author to depict several aspects of modern South African life which was a real strength of the novel.

If I could separate my enjoyment of the book from my disinterest in its protagonist I would undoubtedly rate it higher as overall it did maintain my interest, especially with the excellent narration of the audio version from Justine Eyre. But in the end this has to be about my reaction to the book and frankly I can’t imagine myself picking up another book featuring this character (though I would give the author another go if she wrote something with a different character in it or at least taking the lead role).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

THE FALLEN has been reviewed (far more positively so don’t just take my word on the matter) at Jen’s Book Thoughts and Kittling: Books

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Narrator Justine Eyre
Publisher AudioGO [2012]
ASIN B007OX6MTE
Length 10 hours 16 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #3 in Jade De Jong series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: Trackers by Deon Meyer

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It’s hard to know how to talk about TRACKERS without giving away too many of the book’s surprises which come from both story and structure so I shall err on the side of caution. I don’t think it’s letting too much out of the bag to say that there are three distinct books here, and though the reader assumes the stories will eventually intertwine most connections are not made until almost the very end so you are really reading three independent stories. While this maintains suspense it does require more than the usual amount of small-detail retention on the part of the reader, something that proved quite challenging with the audio version of the book.

The first and most prominent of the three stories centres around a woman called Milla Strachan who, when we meet her, is just coming to the decision to leave her violent, philandering husband and their boorish, spoiled son. Although she trained to be a journalist she has not worked for many years and struggles to find a job until she spies a small newspaper advertisement. That leads to a report-writing job with a government agency. In the second book we meet a young freelance bodyguard called Lemmer who is hired for the seemingly innocuous job of escorting two endangered rhinos being smuggled into the country from Zimbabwe on behalf of a wealthy and slightly dodgy farmer. In the final book of TRACKERS we follow the trail of former policeman Mat Joubert as he starts his new job as a private investigator and takes on the case of a missing husband whose wife is unsatisfied with what she perceives to have been a fairly cursory investigation by police.

All three stories are compelling in their own right though I have to admit to finding the first one a little tough-going in parts. Although the audio narration was excellent I found the very complicated plot a little hard to follow in this format and did have to rewind quite a bit which is something I very rarely need to do. I had no such problems with the other two books within this book and perhaps for that reason I enjoyed those two stories slightly more than the first.

There are several elements which link the books, the most obvious being that each depicts some version of tracking; be it people, animals, objects or something less tangible.  This could have been clumsy in a less talented author’s hands but Meyer is a terrific storyteller and manages to use this device almost without the reader noticing it’s being done. Another theme common to the stories is that the main character in each one is at something of a crossroads in his or her life and the events cause, or force, them to learn something not entirely comfortable about their own makeup. Milla Strachan’s case is probably the most dramatic of the three but these threads are all fascinating and provide part of the depth of this book.

The remainder of that depth comes from the other thing which links the books which is the  ever-present commentary on life in modern South Africa. It is almost as if Meyer has written a non-fiction book underneath the fictional one in which he is depicting a year in the life of his country. Setting the main part of the story in the time leading up to the country’s hosting of the football (soccer) world cup offers scope to show how the country and its residents want to be seen on the all-important international stage, while the disparate stories within TRACKERS allow a broad cross-section of ‘routine’ lives to be depicted which helps readers build up a real picture of the country today. Again it is something you almost don’t notice until the book is finished when you suddenly realise you have such a detailed picture of the place that you feel like you could walk into the pages and feel at home.

I think I’ve only scratched the surface of all that is good about TRACKERS so can only recommend you read the book for yourselves, though I’d only recommend the audio format to seasoned listeners. It is an intelligent, compelling thriller with a fantastic range of characters and an absorbing sense of place. At a time when many successful writers seem content to write the same book over and over again Meyer is to be applauded for continuing to stretch himself and his readers.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Trackers has been reviewed at International Noir Fiction, Mysteries in Paradise, Petrona, The Game’s Afoot and was chosen as one of 2011′s best thrillers by Kirkus Reviews

I’ve reviewed three of Deon Meyer’s other books Devil’s Peak, Dead at Daybreak and Thirteen hours.  There hasn’t been a dud in the bunch.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4.5/5
Author website http://www.deonmeyer.com/
Translator K.L. Seegers (from Afrikaans)
Narrator Saul Reichlin, Rupert Degas, Sandra Duncan
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton [2011]
ASIN B005OSUOAE (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 17 hours and 55 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer

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This is the last book I needed to read to complete the 2010 CWA International Dagger Award shortlist and is the third book I have read by Deon Meyer.

The story takes place across a single day. In the early Cape Town morning almost simultaneously a young girl’s body is found in a churchyard and a record producer is discovered dead in his home with his alcoholic wife sleeping nearby. Both cases are high profile and require urgent action, the first because it soon becomes clear that there is another young girl, an American tourist called Rachel Anderson, on the run from the people responsible for the dead girl and the second because if the man’s wife didn’t kill him then the most likely suspect is a celebrated gospel singer.  Two relatively new detectives, Vusumuzi Ndabeni (Vusi) and Fransman Dekker, are put in charge of one case each. Both are being mentored by Benny Griessel who is something of a dinosaur in ‘the new South Africa’ but who has lots of knowledge and experience to share if Vusi and Dekker choose to learn from him. Benny is under enormous pressure from himself and everyone around him. Can he still cut it when it matters?

A few weeks ago I described my perfect thriller. I said

If a thriller has

  • A twisty, turn-y plot that clips along at a decent pace and offers a pay-off for my investment of time (e.g. family reunited/world saved/justice done)
  • At least a couple of characters who, if not exactly three-dimensional, provide enough humanity that I care whether they live (or die), triumph over adversity (or fail) or right a wrong (or don’t).

it will probably get a rating of 3 (= decent/solid entertaining read) on my personal scale. There is a chance of extra points for humour, above-average excitement levels, deeper than usual exploration of a theme that interests me, a male character who doesn’t viewevery woman he meets as a potential bed mate or a female character who doesn’t look like a supermodel yet, miraculously, proves to have some value to the world anyway. Keeping the car chases short and detailed descriptions of weaponry to a minimum also scores bonus points.

Thirteen Hours gets a tick for each and every one of these points and a bonus for something I didn’t include above (but should have): an ending that didn’t make me roll my eyes and/or wish I’d stopped reading 30 pages beforehand. In essence it’s a perfect example of its genre and I absolutely loved it.

In thrillers plot is king and here the story is fast, unpredictable and has just the right level of complication. We switch back and forth between the two cases with often breathtaking speed and there are no convenient spots at which to pause for respite. This is the kind of book that the ‘page-turner’ cliché should be reserved for as I literally tore pages in my haste to find out what would happen next.

What excites me even more than a great story though is characters who involve and engage me and Thirteen Hours has bunches of them. Benny Griessel is intriguing: a recovering alcoholic struggling to re-connect with his family as well as find a place for himself in the newly restructured police force. But far from being dour or melancholic he’s funny and philosophical while still driven to do his job well for all the right reasons. His two mentees are equally interesting though vastly different people from Benny. Vusi is a quiet man reflecting on his mother’s simple view of the new world while finding his feet in a city new to him and Dekker is angry about prejudices he has been subject to as a coloured man in a black and white South Africa. There are plenty of other deft portrayals too and never knowing who would be a minor character and who would play a larger role made them all the more interesting.

Perhaps it didn’t hurt that the buzzing of the dreaded vuvuzela accompanied my reading of the last few chapters of the book (during the opening moments of the football world cup final) but another of the things that the book does beautifully is create a sense of its location. It is done more subtly than in Meyer’s previous books, such as when Rachel’s parents learn about South Africa’s crime rate from the internet and an when an elderly man who briefly helps Rachel discusses the country’s past and future, but it has no less of an impact for that. All the complications of a country in a state of great change where people of all backgrounds are both eager for and fearful of the new ways are played out in a myriad of small but fascinating details.

It’s not often that I feel like describing a book as perfect but I simply cannot think of a single thing I would change about Thirteen Hours. It has everything you’d want in a thriller and loads more besides, and is the hefty object I shall be hurling at the very next person who says in my hearing that crime fiction isn’t real literature.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 5/5

Translator K L Seegers Publisher Hodder & Stoughton [this edition 2010, original edition 2008]; ISBN 9780340953600; Length 412 pages

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Thirteen Hours has also been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Euro Crime, Material Witness, International Noir Fiction and Reviewing the Evidence

Deon Meyer’s Devil’s Peak was one of my top ten reads for 2008 and Dead at Daybreak was another excellent book of his that I read this year.

Review: Let the Dead Lie by Malla Nunn

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Malla Nunn’s first novel, A Beautiful Place to Die, was one of my favourite books of last year so I was keen to get my hands on this second, follow-up novel. I’m also counting it towards my Aussie Authors challenge because even though Nunn was born in Swaziland and the book is set in South Africa she lives in Australia and, as is our practice, we’ve happily adopted her as our own.

In the 1950′s it’s eight months since the events of A Beautiful Place to Die and, under South Africa’s increasingly draconian apartheid laws, Emmanuel Cooper has been re-classified as non-white and stripped of his job in the police. He’s had to move to Durban and is working a manual labour job by day and doing undercover surveillance work documenting police corruption at the dockyards for his former boss at night. It’s during his night time work that he stumbles across the body of a young boy, Jolly Marks. Of course investigating deaths is no longer Cooper’s job but he is compelled to work the case anyway. When he is accused of being the one to have committed the crime, and two subsequent murders, he has only a brief window of time to clear his name.

Once again Malla Nunn has delivered a brilliant depiction of a time and place. In the urban setting the harshness of the political situation is even more starkly displayed than was the case with the first book which took place in the remote Jacob’s Rest. With so many routine day-to-day activities now controlled by the myriad of new laws virtually everyone is in danger of doing something illegal at some point and the distrust, paranoia and necessary self-interest this engenders is portrayed here to perfection. There is also a hefty dose of desperation displayed by many characters caught in horrendous circumstances such as having married before the laws came into effect and now learning the marriage is outlawed because the couple are newly classified as different races. What struck me too here was that on top of all the kinds of hell the regime settled upon the civilian population it made the ever-present ‘us and them’ mentality between police and the wider community that much worse because, essentially, everyone a policeman comes across is a criminal of one sort or another. Even an honourable cop struggles to deal with that.

Characterisations are Nunn’s other great skill. I liked Emmanuel Cooper even more than in the first book though he is not always a likable human being. But as a character, flaws and all, he is the sort of person who leaps off the page. Experiencing first hand the plight of being classified out of the self-appointed ruling race and losing his job, the main thing by which he defines himself as a human being, make Cooper lose some of his confidence and sense of self-worth. He seems even more haunted by the phantom of his former Sergeant Major and is generally not functioning at his best but he strives, not always successfully, to do no harm to others, especially when the two friends he made in Jacob’s Rest come to town to help him. There isn’t a single standout villain here but there’s a criminal under

As far as story goes I found the middle section a bit woolly with a couple of complications too many. Apart from Cooper, who simply can’t let the dead lie, no one seemed to care much about the murder victims because they were too busy worrying about themselves (not without good reason I admit) or, in the case of the cops, were focussed on ‘getting’ Cooper. For a while the story lost its way a little though it ended strongly with a nail-biting but believable climax.

Emmanuel Copper is certainly not the first flawed protagonist in crime fiction but I find him unique in terms of the experiences he’s endured and I’m left wanting to read more about him. And while this is too confronting a setting to be considered a comfort read it is superbly drawn and, alas, all too believable. I heartily recommend this book though would suggest reading A Beautiful Place to Die first to get a full sense of all that Cooper has had and lost before becoming who he is in this novel.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Publisher Simon & Schuster [2010,]; ISBN 97814116586227; Length 382 pages

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Let the Dead Lie has also been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction and you might also want to read my review of A Beautiful Place to Die

Review: Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer

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In South Africa Zatopek (Zet to his friends) van Heerden is an ex cop now working, reluctantly, as a private detective. Lawyer Hope Beneke hires him to find the will of an antiques dealer called Johannes Jacobus Smit who was killed in his home nearly a year earlier. If the will is not found within seven days Hope’s client, Wilna van As who was Smit’s live-in partner, will not receive any of Smit’s estate. One thread of this book takes off then as a fairly standard, if action-packed, procedural that counts back from Day 7 through van Heerden’s investigation into what happened to Smit and where the will might have ended up. The other thread of the book, revealed in alternating chapters, is a recounting of Zet’s life from his childhood onwards to his present circumstance of being self-proclaimed trash with evil in his heart.

The flawed protagonist is certainly not a new invention but I did find myself completely engaged by Zet van Heerden whose route to personal destruction is far from run-of-the-mill. The son of a miner and an artist, Zet’s journey to becoming a policeman and profiler is revealed in such a way that it feels perfectly natural and entirely believable even though it described many events which are completely foreign to me. One of the things that I like most about the characterisation of Zet is that although he’s depicted as quite sad, even depressed at times, he’s not always so and he does maintain some healthy relationships. For example he’s very close to his mother, the only woman he cooks for, and manages to make great friends with some unlikely people along the way even if he struggles to find the kind of love his father and mother shared.

The plot is quite complicated, with both threads getting sidetracked at times, but I found it remarkably easy to follow which is a credit to both Meyer’s writing and the excellent translation from Afrikaans by Madeleine Van Biljon which has retained all the bantering and colloquialisms that are sometimes lost in translated novels. As often happens with thrillers I did find the ending a teeny bit disappointing in terms of the alarming number of testosterone fueled shoot-outs that took place, but overall it was interestingly paced,  full of suspense and quite unpredictable. Along the way there are some absolutely beautiful vignettes, such as when Zet and Hope discuss their personal feelings about the country’s referendum on apartheid in 1992 or when Tiny Mpayipheli, a man Zet engages to protect his mother when the search for the will gets dangerous, describes a rugby match he played in the Soviet Union.

Dead at Daybreak is a little more noir than what I tend to think of as ‘my’ kind of crime fiction but I found it captivating. Alongside the male-dominated narrative and the shootouts at the end there’s plenty of heart and intelligence in this book which made it a very satisfying reading experience for me. Saul Reichlin added to my enjoyment with his wonderful narration which included excellent South African accents that helped make me feel like I was half a world away and he might just have the sexiest voice I’ve heard on an audio book. Ever.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Translator: Madeleine Van Biljon; Narrator: Saul Reichlin; Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks [this edition 2007, originally 2000]; ISBN: N/A (downloaded from audible.com); Length 13hrs 3mins; Setting: South Africa

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The only other book of Deon Meyer’s that I’ve read (so far) is Devil’s Peak which I thought was so good it made it into my top ten reads for 2008.

Review: A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn

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beautiful place to dieTitle: A Beautiful Place to Die

Author: Malla Nunn

Publisher: Pan MacMillan [2008]

ISBN: 978-1-405-03877-5

Length: 397 pages

Genre: Historical crime fiction / police procedural

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 5/5

One-liner: A stunningly confronting yet beautiful book.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In the early 1950′s in the small South African town of Jacob’s Rest the police captain, Willem Pretorius, is found brutally murdered. When Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is sent to investigate he struggles against the backdrop of the newly instituted racial segregation laws (apartheid) . Pretorius’ Afrikaner family want quick vengeance: they distrust Cooper who is English and assume it is the black community or coloureds who have killed their patriarch. At the same time the Security Police descend on the town and work on the theory that Pretorius was killed by a communist or other political activist and they soon sideline Cooper from their investigation.

Of the many striking things about this book the one that is likely to stay with me longest is the unflichingly honest picture it paints of the time and place in which it is set. So many engrossing details of both the political and physical setting are provided that I easily felt myself in the town of Jacob’s Rest with its roads for whites and its kaffir paths and its segregated Sunday church services with potluck dinners. I felt awkward and angry as the realities of the segregation laws were demonstrated through the story playing out but despite my discomfort I found myself unwilling to leave the place even for a moment and read the entire book in a single sitting.

On top of the setting the book has stunning characters. Cooper struggles with nightmares from his days in the trenches during the war and regularly argues with the voice of his former Sergeant Major. Although white he is distrusted by the powerful Afrikaners but also finds it hard to be accepted by the myriad second class citizens although, ultimately, it is a myriad collection of these people, including captain Pretorius’ Zulu ‘brother’ Constable Samuel Shabalala, who help him with his investigation. But it’s not only the sympathetic characters who are brilliantly depicted: Lieutenant Piet Lapping of the Special Branch is one of the most loathsome men you’ll find in crime fiction, all the more so because he’s entirely believable.

Of course none of this would be worth much if the book didn’t also tell a gripping story and there’s a real old-fashioned whodunnit here. In trying to uncover who killed Willem Pretorius Cooper uncovers a series of crimes that have been left unsolved because the victims weren’t white and also learns of Pretorius’ own moral lapses. He races to find what these events may have had to do with Pretorius’ death as he tries to salvage his own career from being ruined by the Special Branch.

This is yet another book that has everything I look for in my crime fiction and had me alternating between indignant mutterings under my breath, heart-in-my-mouth fear and more than a few tears.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A Beautiful Place to Die has been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction,  Reviewing the Evidence and Crime Down Under

Malla Nunn was born ins Swaziland but lives in Australia so we’re claiming her as ours. This interview with her on Radio National’s Book Show last December prompted me to go out and buy the book (and it only took me 11 months to rescue it from the TBR pile).

Review: Devil’s Peak by Deon Meyer

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Title: Devil’s Peak

Author: Deon Meyer

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton (2007)

ISBN: 978-0-340-89705-8

In present-day South Africa three stories unfold in parallel. Christine explains to a patient Minister what led to her becoming a prostitute while Benny, an alcoholic police officer, has one last-ditch attempt to salvage his marriage and career. At the same time Thobela, a former freedom-fighter, is devastated when his adopted son is killed as an innocent bystander to a robbery and he turns to a life of vengeance.

This book reminded me of Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore. Although they’re set on different continents both books stretch the boundaries of traditional crime fiction and use the genre to demonstrate wider social issues in an understated way. And, like Temple, Meyer paints the most spectacular pictures with often only a handful of words, as with the sentence

“Beyond George the houses of the wealthy sat like fat ticks against the dunes, silently competing for a better sea view”.

The book is littered with such startlingly clear images that make it easy to visualise the people never met and the places never visited.

At the beginning of the book I almost groaned audibly at the thought of yet another drunken copper (I’ve lost count of how many I’ve met over the years) but Meyer’s depiction of the alcoholic’s constant struggle with his demons is the most eloquently heart-wrenching character development I’ve read in a long time and I was soon internally cheering Benny’s day-by-day efforts along. In fact Meyer takes his time, and ours, establishing all three characters and their separate, but ultimately linked stories. In a lesser writer’s hands this would be annoying but here provides a solid foundation for what otherwise could be an unbelievable or far-fetched climax. Instead the stories are tantalisingly built to their inevitable but gripping combination and resolution.

While I won’t pretend that one book can give a definitive view of such a mammoth thing as post-apartheid South Africa  I think a good book can provide a valid snapshot of a time and place that helps define the bigger picture. All three characters struggle with details of ‘the new South Africa’ in very real ways that made me think more deeply than I’ve done before about what the removal of the apartheid system might have been like to live through from a variety of perspectives.

I learned since reading this book that while not strictly part of a series there are other books featuring some of these characters however I didn’t once have the sense I was missing something by not having read anything else by this author. The book works entirely as a suspense-filled standalone novel which is haunting, unpredictable and utterly absorbing.

My rating 4.5/5

Other reviews:

Euro Crime reviewed the audio version of the book in June 2008