Crime comes to the African bush and for anybody who loves the sights, smells, sounds and people of this continent, Elliott brings them to life here. She understands Africa and partners her husband in a tourism business in Zimbabwe.
Elliott’s focus is Africa, the intrepid Detective Inspector Jabulani Sibanda and his loyal partners, Sgt Ncube and Miss Daisy. We met them in earlier sunshine noirs (Sibanda and the Rainbird, Sibanda and the Death Head’s Moth). This time they are up against serial killers. Sibanda finds the mutilated and skinned body of a woman on the side of a railway line in the Matabele bush. The team knows that there are more bodies to come and they begin their nifty, and at times unexpectedly funny, tracking.
Africa is there on every page and the whole landscape becomes a character in the story.
Johannesburg is the scene of in this plot about the dramatic attempted sabotage of a nuclear centre near the city. An employee, Carlos Botha, is the main suspect. He is a skilled operator and is missing.
PI Jade de Jong is put on the trail of this man, who could be a major threat to national security, and tracks him to the West Rand. The search gives Jozi people a new look at their city. The author lives in Johannesburg and illustrates it well.
De Jong tracks Botha down, but the unexpected happens (not a spoiler) – she has to form an alliance with him because the danger has increased to global proportions.
Being a feisty female cop, De Jong takes the mayhem in her stride on this mission to expose terrorists. Or are they? Could the danger be coming from inside? If you have not read Mackenzie before (eg The Widow Fiona Barton), you could start with Bad Seeds. It may be noir, but has lots of lovely South African sunshine and a fresh look at the City of Gold.
The author lives in two cities, Cape Town and London, and published this noir last year. He has used the drought and sweltering sun in this dark introduction of a serial killer, with a sideplot of terrorism and a disastrous street bombing.
But be calm, we still have Col Vaughn de Vries, from previous Mendelson writings (The First Rule of Survival, The History of Blood, The Serpentine Road). De Vries is now a bit longer in the tooth and somewhat disenchanted.
Our staunch policeman unravels a story of murder, terrorism and the mysterious Apostle Lodge. This is a strange, very modern house against Table Mountain, but it has a dark history. The architect was German. The owners live in Germany; the house is uninhabited; a four-year old girl was drowned by her preteen brother decades ago and the mutilated body of a woman starved to death with her eyes gouged out, is discovered in Apostle Lodge. Read it, if you dare.
Deon Meyer needs no introduction. His books are global, turned into movies and translated into many languages.
Here we have Fever, published a few years ago as Koors, but now in English and losing none of its Meyer-expertise and eye to the unusual.
We meet in a South Africa of desolation, nuclear contamination, ferocious animals, mad people on motor cycles and diminished humanity. People have been put in massive graves, killed by a virus that has decimated mankind.
Our protagonists are the young Nico Storm and his father – lone survivors, fighting against the odds and a very, very dark world.
Author Tess Gerritsen (Playing with Fire) has said: “Deon Mayer’s name on the cover is a guarantee.” We agree.
Building South Africa through better roads