Deon Meyer – BooksPlease

Blood Safari by Deon Meyer, originally written in Afrikaans, translated by K L Seegers is set in South Africa. It’s a tense thriller/detective story.

Lemmer was demolishing a wall between the kitchen and bathroom on Christmas Day when the phone rang. It was his boss at Body Armour, a company specialising in personal security. Lemmer is a professional bodyguard and is hired by Emma Le Roux after she was attacked in her home by three men wearing balaclavas. Her brother, Jacobus had disappeared twenty years previously, but she thinks she saw him on the news, suspected of killing four poachers near the Kruger National Park and she is convinced by an anonymous phone call, that the attack is connected to her brother.

Desperate to know whether Jacobus de Villiers is in fact her brother, Emma and Lemmer travel to the Lowveld to find out. This leads them into all sorts of dangers and Lemmer, who has a short fuse, doesn’t know who can be trusted, including Emma herself. Lemmer, an ex-con is the strong silent type. His First Law is: Don’t get involved and his second is Trust nobody. Despite that when someone tries to murder both him and Emma he has no choice.

This isn’t just crime fiction, however. It’s also a novel about South Africa, the countryside and its people. I found that just as fascinating, although at times the environmental issues came over as lectures and maybe would have been better if they were shorter – I now know quite a bit about African vultures amongst other things. But that is just a minor criticism as the book as a whole is totally engaging, with a satisfying plot, convincing characters and a colourful and well-drawn setting.

Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer (translated from Afrikaans by K L Seegers) is a great book. I was engrossed in it right from the start. It’s tense, taut and utterly enthralling. Moving at a fast pace the book follows the events during the thirteen hours from 05:36 when Rachel, a young American girl is running for her life up the steep slope of Lion’s Head in Capetown. The body of another American girl is found outside the Lutheran church in Long Street. Her throat slit had been slit. An hour or so later Alexandra Barnard, a former singing star and an alcoholic, wakes from a drunken stupor to find the dead body of her husband, a record producer, lying on the floor opposite her and his pistol lying next to her.

It’s not just the story that makes this book such a gripping read, but the characters are so well-drawn too. DI Benny Griessel is mentoring two inexperienced detectives who are investigating these crimes. I grew very fond of Benny, who is also an alcoholic and struggling to keep his marriage together. He deals with mentoring his charges very well, with patience and expertise, but also gets emotionally involved when Rachel’s father entreats him to save his daughter. There are many other memorable characters, such as Inspector Mbali Kaleni, a Zulu woman with a powerful personality who commands people’s attention, and the elderly Piet van der Lingen, who helped Rachel, looking like an ‘aged monk with his thinning grey hair around the bald spot that shone in the flourescent light.’

The two cases move along parallel to each other, keeping me desperate to know what happened next in both. The book also reflects the racial tension in the ‘new South Africa’ with its mix of white, coloured and black South Africans. There is a strong sense of location, not just from the cultural aspect but also geographical because although I know nothing about Capetown I had no difficulty in visualising the scenes from Meyer’s descriptions.

Without doubt this has to be one of the best books I’ve read this year, one that had me eager to get back to it each time I had to stop reading.