BOOK SA – Reviews

Verdict: carrot, carrot

Nicol is proving that hard-boiled, tough thrillers can be set, and set successfully, in South Africa. He is showing us a dangerous, lawless land where an awful lot of people have reasons to be seeking revenge and where laws are honoured in the breach.

• Complete review in the Witness (no paywall!)

Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso are back. The two private security specialists based in Cape Town have a new challenge: to stay alive and keep their families safe, while earning a living the only way they know how.

Killer Country is the second instalment in what will ultimately be the Revenge trilogy involving two former Umkhonto we Sizwe operatives-turned-gun runners and now – in democratic South Africa – bodyguards and fixers.

• Complete review at IOL Tonight

Book Details

• Killer Country by Mike Nicol
  EAN: 9781415201169
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Verdict: killer carrots

Local crime writers are painfully aware that they tread a self-immolating minefield of political correctness while they try to avoid racial stereotyping.

The good news, though, is that things are getting murkier and more real. Mike Nicol’s powerful second novel featuring black-and-white duo, Pylon Buso and Mace Bishop – former liberation struggle gun dealers, now in private security – depicts a South Africa where the running sores of ruthless cadre enrichment, state corruption, and casual violence causes even the tough guys to flinch.

• Complete review in the Sunday Times

Book Details

• Killer Country by Mike Nicol
  EAN: 9781415201169
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• Nairobi Heat by Mukoma wa Ngugi
  EAN: 9780143026174
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• Refuge by Andrew Brown
  EAN: 9781770220621
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Uitspraak: wortel

Mapstieks meisie, maar jy’t my laat naels kou!

Margie Orford se derde boek, waarin die raakvat-joernalis dr. Clare Hart verskyn, sny byna te na aan die been.

Die storie, soos die titel skimp, fokus op die verdwyning van jong meisies, meestal in die bende-geteisterde Kaapse Vlakte. Enige iemand wat gereeld na die sewe-uur-nuus kyk, het genoeg opgegaarde beelde van vermiste- kleinmeisiejie-skoolfoto’s, om Daddy’s Girlte sien as fiksie wat die werklikheid weerspieël

• Volledige resensie in Rapport

• Daddy’s Girl tuisblad

Boekbesonderhede

• Daddy’s Girl deur Margie Orford
  EAN: 9781868423262
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Verdict: carrot for the US edition of Mike Nicol and Joanne Hichens‘ Out to Score – which was published there, a la Michael Stanley, under a single pseudonym, Sam Cole:

In Cole’s colorful, gritty debut, ex-Cape Town cops Jeffrey “Mullet” Mendes and Vincent Saldana team up to start a detective agency. It’s slow going at first, but maybe that’s just as well since Saldana hasn’t been sober 24 hours since his wife died in a car accident five months ago. Mendes keeps body and soul together selling pot and fishing on his beloved boat, the Maryjane.

Then two cases come in at once. Mendes gets the errant husband surveillance while the sultry-voiced client requests Saldana, “a major abalone buster in the Anti-Poaching Unit.” Abalone, an expensive aphrodisiac in the Far East, is heavily poached in the wild and now Marina Welsh’s new abalone farm has been burgled and she wants Saldanha to catch the thieves on their inevitable return.

• Complete review at Seacoastline

Book Details

• Cape Greed by Mike Nicol, Sam Cole
  EAN: 9780312373405
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• Out to Score by Mike Nicola, Joanne Hichens
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781415200025
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Verdict: carrot, but with reservations. De Kock wonders aloud whether Crime Beat editor Mike Nicol’s commitment to crime writing is symptomatic of a larger trend – the dumbing-down of South African literature. “That big question for the serious critics of South African literature becomes relevant here,” de Kock writes, “has Nicol found the form… that allows the most astute social analysis possible in current conditions, or is he a formerly serious, literary writer who has deliberately dumbed down to play to the gallery… ?”

You get the good guys, Mace Bishop and Pylon Busi, two former MK operatives turned arms dealers turned private security consultants, each with a wife and a child, trying to live the good life in Cape Town. They’ve got senses of humour to kill for, a whole new brand of SA Lite: laugh-a-minute scepticism about the New SA shenanigans going down all over the place, especially among the newly empowered arrivistes against whom they frequently come up in mortal combat. In Payback, it was Mo Siq, in Killer Country it is Obed Chocho. Big-shot empowerment dudes with big-time connections and a low morality score.

South African literature has come a long way from Cry, the Beloved Country to Killer Country. In Paton’s great liberal novel, a cry of humanist outrage at the implicit violence of social racism, as much as in Nadine Gordimer’s novels about the ways in which things went wrong in South Africa’s 20th century, there is a deep moral sense, an inviolable core of belief that things can, and should, be otherwise. Ditto the works of Andre Brink, Achmat Dangor, Breyten Breytenbach, Marlene van Niekerk, Wally Serote, even JM Coetzee. And, one should add, Mike Nicol before he turned into a crime-thriller writer.

• Complete review in the Sunday Independent

• Killer Country homepage

Book Details

• Killer Country by Mike Nicol
  EAN: 9781415201169
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Verdict: carrot

Jassy Mackenzie’s debut novel Random Violence was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the Best First Book category in the Africa Region, and was recently translated into German. Her second book, another sassy thriller, titled My Brother’s Keeper, is lauded by the likes of Deon Meyer and Jeffrey Deaver, both masters of the genre, and should be at least as successful.

The novel opens with a scene many South African readers will be familiar with, if not from personal experience, then from the media: in the beginning of the millennium a gang of four men attempt to break into a luxurious Joburg property, lured by the neighbourhood’s “plasma-screen TVs and big computers, their hi-fi systems and gold jewellery, their cash and their safes. And their other safes. Always ask where the other safe is. Jam the gun into the woman’s throat, and ask the man.”

But the scenario of this particular crime differs from our usual everyday experience. Three of the robbers are shot dead by one of the inhabitants of the house, the fourth is knocked out.

• Complete review in the Sunday Independent

• My Brother’s Keeper homepage

Book Details

• My Brother’s Keeper by Jassy Mackenzie
  EAN: 9781415200780
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Verdict: stick

I am indifferent after reading Robert Kilgore’s recently released book, We Are All Zimbabweans Now. This novel is about American student Ben Dabney who abandons his wife and child to embark on a journey to Zimbabwe in the 1980s.

Zimbabwe had just gained its independence and Ben is interested in Robert Mugabe’s speech in which he mentions that we are all Zimbabwean, including the white people.

He had forgiven the oppressors and that made Ben even more interested in travelling to Zimbabwe, citing that the Americans had something to learn from Zimbabweans. He even calls Zimbabwe the Land of forgiveness.

• Complete review at IOL Tonight

• We are All Zimbabweans Now homepage

Book Details

• We are All Zimbabweans Now by James Kilgore
  EAN: 9781415200711
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Uitspraak: stokkie

Karin Brynard gee met Plaasmoord ‘n ander perspektief op dié geweldsmisdaad wat dikwels as polities of rasgedrewe gesien word.

Maar Fanie Olivier skryf in ‘n resensie in Rapport: “Ongelukkig kom die ingewikkelde gegewe waarmee Brynard werk (plaasmoorde, grondonteiening, rassespannings, kunstenaarskap en betrokkenheid) eenvoudig nie uit die verf nie.”

Olivier voel die leser word deur die skrywer onderskat, want dit was vir hom vroeg reeds duidelik dat die boek nie oor ‘n gewone plaasmoord gaan nie. “Te veel uitspel en te min inspeel.” Al meen Olivier Brynard kán skryf, kry die boek ‘n stokkie.

Die woord “plaasmoord’’ is in die Suid-Afrikaanse omgewing gelaai met emosie. Veral in die Afrikaanse plattelandse gemeenskap het dit ’n ingrypende betekenis gekry. ’n Boek met hierdie titel gaan dus nie ongemerk verby nie, veral as dit heelwat mediadekking met die verskyning kry.

Die joernalis Karin Brynard kies Plaasmoord as titel, sowel as tema, vir haar debuutroman. Dié speurdrama van oor die 500 bladsye speel af in die Noord-Kaap, op die grens van die Kgalagadi-reservaat, en dit is vir die veediewe wat in die verhaal aan die werskaf is maar ’n hanetreetjie van Botswana af.

• Volledige resensie in Rapport

• Plaasmoord tuisblad

Boekbesonderhede

• Plaasmoord deur Karin Brynard
  EAN: 9780798151160
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Verdict: carrot

Die spel tussen goed en kwaad is ‘n belangrike bestanddeel van enige misdaadroman. Chris Karsten bemeester hierdie spel in Seisoen van sonde.

Deborah Steinmair skryf in ‘n resensie op LitNet: “Die karakters is allesbehalwe eendimensioneel: hulle is kompleks, vol goede en kwade impulse, vol nuanse.”

Sy meen die boek is “uiters leesbaar” en dat die leser al vinniger sal omblaai.

Daar is opeens ’n hele paar eksjoernaliste wat hulle met Afrikaanse fiksie besig hou. Die media se verlies is lesers se wins. Ek het Chris Karsten se Ware Misdaad-reeks (niefiksie) gulsig gelees en gereken dit was uiters leesbaar maar redelik sensasioneel, duidelik ’n poging om die pot aan die kook te hou. Ek was mateloos beïndruk met Frats, sy roman oor ’n slawevrou, wat verlede jaar die ATKV-Woordveertjieprys gewen het, en het besef die man kán skryf.

• Volledige resensie by LitNet

Boekbesonderhede

• Seisoen van sonde deur Chris Karsten
  EAN: 9780798150385
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Uitspraak: wortel

Dit hoef nie wéér gesê te word dat Deon Meyer man-alleen ’n wesenlike mark vir Afrikaanse misdaadfiksie geskep het nie. Wat wel beklemtoon kan word, is die gehalte van die onlangse stroom spanningsverhale. Dink maar aan Geldwolf deur Carel van der Merwe of Piet Steyn se Snoeiskêr. Afrikaanse spanningskrywers besef om hul lesers se belangstelling te behou en met die Engelse mark mee te ding, moet hulle goed kan skryf én prikkelende temas betrek.

Plaasmoord se titel verklap reeds ’n aktuele, selfs omstrede tema. Brynard bestorm ’n domein waar min engele dit sal waag. Die politieke aspekte rondom plaasmoorde word deeglik by die vertelling betrek, maar só aangebied dat dit nie die vermaaklikheidswaarde ondermyn nie.

• Lees die volledige resensie in Die Volksblad

Boekbesonderhede

• Plaasmoord deur Karin Brynard
  EAN: 9780798151160
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!