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Recently South Africa has been producing some invigorating, eye-opening crime fiction, with Deon Meyer as the most famous (and arguably most accomplished) author of the lot. Jassy Mackenzie is a new kid on the block with what the US publisher calls "a Jade de Jong Investigation." In this series debut, the daughter of a murdered police commissioner returns to Johannesburg after a decade abroad and is asked by her friend David Patel, recently promoted to Superintendent, to help him with a murder case. A woman has been lured out of her car by a sabotaged security gate and shot to death. Jade digs into the investigation, but at the same time reconnects with another friend on the wrong side of town, one who knows she has unfinished business, avenging her father's murder the moment one of the white extremists responsible is released from prison. Though Mackenzie's story has little to do with South Africa's black majority, she does a good job of showing the siege mentality of wealthy white South Africans who live behind guarded gates and travel between safe strongholds accompanied by bodyguards. In fact, it is their assumption that the threat comes from without that puts them at risk; the violence in the book is anything but random. Her plot weaves together the present murder investigation with Jade's anxious secret – that she has killed a man and will do it again to seek justice for her father. It's difficult to overcome the implausibility of a private investigator being invited so casually to play a major role in a murder investigation, and the sadistic murderer seems to have studied the Big Book of Cliché's in preparation for his role. But the plot clicks into place nicely, the pieces snapping together with precision, both story lines offering smart twists as well as compelling action scenes. The main character hasn't quite come into focus yet, but offers promise for a series. She's an outsider - raised in a poor white neighborhood without a mother, taught to shoot at an early age by her father, but too independent to follow him into the police force. Her dilemma of harboring a mix of vengefulness and guilt while working for the police doesn't totally work on an emotional level, but it propels a complex and fast-moving story and sets the groundwork for a series with an interesting female detective, a welcome addition to South African crime fiction. § Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, July 2010
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