PALM STALKER by Rocco Bergh (Penguin)
Naval architect Robert Arquette has had an interesting beginning – a father lost at sea, a mother who died giving birth on a Zululand beach, the child reared first by a hard-drinking Scot living a lonely life in the bush, then by a shady missionary. Found by his uncle and brought to the Cape, he forgets it all – until exhausted by a major design project, he decides to go in search of his past.
That’s not easy, because the Scot – grown even more eccentric – has taken to attacking anyone encroaching on his stretch of coastal dune forest, and it’s been closed to the public. But Robert, who did his stretch on the border, is up to the challenge, and parachutes in – and the adventure begins.
The book has everything – storms at sea and a missing treasure, foreign mercenaries, mega-rich industrialists, rapacious developers – and throughout, the beauty of the bush. If Wilbur Smith wrote gentler books, he might have written something like this.
It would be even longer, though, and Palm Stalker is long enough.