The struggle for liberation was played out in suburbs as well as in townships, a bit of history often ignored. Who recalls the hundreds of detainees kept incommunicado for months, beyond the protection of human rights lawyers and the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee? Who remembers anonymous phone calls to houses in Kensington, Melrose, Yeoville; visits from teams of security policemen; the (often) life-and-death puzzle of whom to trust?
Southern Cross by Jann Turner (Orion) revives the paranoia and violence of the latter half of the 1980s in a thriller focused on two African National Congress cadres: Anna Kriel, a trade union organiser, and her lover, Paul Lewis, whose bullet-riddled, burnt body is found with a colleague’s on the road to Vryburg only two days after his release from detention.
Years later, now an official in safety and security in Pretoria, Anna goes to the truth commission to find his murderer and encounters a South African journalist based in Britain, who holds the key to the mystery.
Turner covered the truth commission for SABC TV’s Special Report; and this novel, her third, sketches the dramas within and around the commission as sharply as she handles the world of journalism and the shift in style, if not emphasis, for activists a decade on.
Walking the Shadows by Donald James (Century) is also a tale of wartime crimes rebounding to haunt the peace.
In the hills above the village of St Juste in the south of France, an old man is hurled to his death before he can explain to his children why he has left his fortune to an English girl, the daughter of one of his employees.
The girl is kidnapped, injured and left in a coma, and her hated American father — a decadent author living off the largesse of a mother who hates him — flies to France, seeking retribution, but also redemption, as he hunts her attacker.
There is a fine evocation of place in this small French village, both during the Vichy regime and half a century later.
Henning Mankell, born in Sweden and currently living in Maputo where he heads the Teatro Avenida, has written nine books featuring Swedish Inspector Kurt Wallander. One Step Behind (Vintage) is number five, which is now available in a new edition and no wonder — it is the novel that best defines Mankell’s success. It is a dose of Swedish depression, but brilliantly done. The plotting is tight and complex, the mystery holds, and Wallander is an interesting fellow — ill and driven, disgusted with corruption among his colleagues. The book deals with the killing of three young people during a Midsummer’s Eve party and the murder of the detective looking into the case. One caveat: the publisher has saved on paper, setting the book in type so small it is a mission to read.
Winter’s End by John Rickards (Michael Joseph) is an entertaining read; it’s hard to believe it’s a first novel. The sheriff of a small town in Maine and his deputy are driving through a thunderstorm one night when their headlights pick out a man holding hunting knives and standing over the naked body of a woman. The sheriff calls in an old friend, now a Boston private eye, to help him find out whether the man is a murderer or merely insane.
Michael Connelly is always first-rate. In Lost Light (Orion), Harry Bosch has quit the Los Angeles Police Department, but has to take on both the city police and the FBI as he reopens a four-year-old case and goes after a killer.
John Connelly’s Bad Men (Hodder & Stoughton) has cop Joe Dupree, along with a rookie officer, standing against a band of killers on the small Maine island of Sanctuary.