Pan Macmillan is delighted to invite you to the launch of international bestselling author Peter James’ Dead Tomorrow, a Roy Grace novel. James will be in conversation with SA krimi queen Margie Orford.
Don’t miss what will surely be a riveting discussion of the dark and mysterious world of crime thriller fiction. We’ll see you there!
Event Details
Book Details
Photo courtesy sanderus
THIS is the fifth of nine synopses of books eligible for the Citizen Book Prize.
The winner will be determined by readers’ votes. To help get your favourite manuscript published, vote and make your mark (see the voting box below the synopsis).
Voting for each synopsis will be open for the week following its publication in CitiVibe. If you miss that, you will be able to reread and vote for all nine synopses online from November 5 – 11.
Vote now! Tell your friends!
This is the only book prize for unpublished authors chosen by the reading public.
The Citizen Book Prize synopsis five
Bad Blood
by Amanda Coetzee
TO find a missing child, a detective must return to the past that he is running from. The police know the date and they know the victim, but can they find him in time?
An eight-year-old boy abandoned by his mother at a fairground is raised by a clan of Irish travellers as one of their own. Given the name Harry, as in “any Tom, Dick or Harry”, he carves out a reputation as a formidable bare-knuckle boxer.
Fists always at the ready, matched by an unremitting refusal to back down, he is given the clan name “Badger”.
Eight years on, Badger is angry, dangerous and ready to make his own way in the world.
He is convinced that he is of “bad blood” – he doesn’t know who or where his birth parents are and cannot imagine why his mother abandoned him.
He secretly believes there is something wrong with him that explains his having been abandoned by her.
Severing all ties with his clan, Badger wanders for several years before, in a final act of rebellion, he applies and is surprisingly accepted to the London Metropolitan Police Force.
He soon finds his niche as an undercover police operative, slowly losing himself in each new role, blending in everywhere, yet belonging nowhere. In spite of his abrasiveness and reclusive nature, Harry is promoted to Detective Inspector of the Drug Squad at New Scotland Yard. He is respected for his loyalty and tenacity, though his unconventional methods make him an unlikely candidate for further promotion. He begins to believe that he has left Badger behind forever, until a traveller child is snatched from an informal settlement in Bedford.
Suspicious of all authority, the local clan refuses to co-operate with the police, taking matters into their own hands. Now desperate to establish a connection with the traveller community and with time running out, Harry is unwillingly sent by his superiors straight back to his past.
Troubled and disoriented, Harry tries to honour his role as a police officer, but in order for the community to accept him, he is forced to shed much of his new persona. In order to keep working the investigation from within the community, he strikes up a tentative partnership with an idealistic social services liaison officer, Emily Meadows.
Together they find themselves distrusted by both the police and the clan. While conducting their own investigation, Emily uncovers a series of startlingly similar child abductions and horrific murders stretching back to August 1985.
Each child is taken precisely eight years apart; they are all eight years old and bear an uncanny physical resemblance to one another. Mikey, the missing boy, is the fourth child in the string of abductions.
Harry and Emily quickly realise that they have less than 24 hours to find him before he too is brutally murdered.
Together, Harry and Emily race to save the missing boy, uncovering a trail that leads right back to the day Harry was abandoned at Brighton Fairground and a final shocking family secret that threatens to destroy them all.
Vote for Bad Blood by Amanda Coetzee
Citizen Book Prize Shortlist: Bad Blood by Amanda Coetzee(survey software)
South African born author of the crime thriller, A Beautiful Place to Die, and award-winning filmmaker Malla Nunn answers the following revealing questions:
Q. How would you describe your life in only 8 words?
A. A chaotic juggling act. Writing, children, dreaming, cooking.
Q. What is your motto or maxim?
A. Ubuntu: We are people through other people.
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Please join us at the 2009 Cape Town Book Fair for a series of exciting and stimulating events.
Our marquee events are listed below, followed by the full Pan Macmillan/Picador Africa programme. We look forward to seeing you there!
WAYS OF STAYING
- Date: Saturday 13 June
- Event: Ways of Staying: a country that will not be forsaken. A discussion with Kevin Bloom, André Brink and Max du Preez, chaired by Leon de Kock
- Time: 12h00 – 12h45
- Venue: DALRO Forum, Cape Town Book Fair
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- Date: Sunday 14 June
- Event: Ways of Staying: Join Kevin Bloom as he discusses his thought-provoking book with Leon de Kock
- Time: 14h00 – 14h45
- Venue: Room 1.61, Cape Town Book Fair
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Award-winning screenwriter Malla Nunn gives us A Beautiful Place to Die, a stunning and darkly romantic crime novel set in 1950s apartheid South Africa. The novel features Detective Emmanuel Cooper — a man caught up in a time and place where racial tensions and the raw hunger for power make life very dangerous indeed.
In a morally complex tale rich with authenticity, Nunn takes readers to Jacob’s Rest, a tiny town on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. It is 1952, and new apartheid laws have recently gone into effect, dividing a nation into black and white while supposedly healing the political rifts between the Afrikaners and the English. Tensions simmer as the fault line between the oppressed and the oppressors cuts deeper, but it’s not until an Afrikaner police officer is found dead that emotions more dangerous than anyone thought possible boil to the surface.
When Detective Emmanuel Cooper, an Englishman, begins investigating the murder, his mission is preempted by the powerful police Security Branch, who are dedicated to their campaign to flush out black communist radicals. But Detective Cooper isn’t interested in political expediency and has never been one for making friends. He may be modest, but he radiates intelligence and certainly won’t be getting on his knees before those in power. Instead, he strikes out on his own, following a trail of clues that lead him to uncover a shocking forbidden love and the imperfect life of Captain Pretorius, a man whose relationships with the black and coloured residents of the town he ruled were more complicated and more human than anyone could have imagined.
The first in her Detective Emmanuel Cooper series, A Beautiful Place to Die marks the debut of a talented writer who reads like a brilliant combination of Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene. It is a tale of murder, passion, corruption, and the corrosive double standard that defined an apartheid nation.
Malla Nunn was born in Swaziland, South Africa, and currently lives in Sydney, Australia. She is a filmmaker with three award-winning films to her credit and is currently at work on her second novel.
Picture of Nunn by Jacky Ghossein
Book details
Photo courtesy the Sydney Morning Herald
Reluctant bank robber Jack Burn is on the run after a heist in the United States that left $3 million missing and one cop dead. Hiding out in Cape Town, South Africa, he is desperate to build a new life for his pregnant wife and young son. But on a tranquil evening in their new suburban neighborhood they are the victims of a random gangland assault that changes everything.
Here’s the gripping first chapter of Roger Smith’s Mixed Blood:
Jack Burn stood on the deck of the house high above Cape Town watching the sun drown itself in the ocean. The wind was coming up again, the southeaster that reminded Burn of the Santa Anas back home. A wind that made a furnace of the night, set nerves jangling, and got the cops and emergency teams caught up in people’s bad choices.
Burn heard the growl of the car without mufflers as it came to a sliding stop. The percussive whump of bass bins bulging out gangsta rap. Not the usual soundtrack of this elite white neighborhood on the slopes of Signal Hill. The car reversed at high speed and stopped again, close by. The engine died, and the rap was silenced in mid-muthahfuckah. Burn looked down at the street, but he couldn’t see the car from this angle.
Susan watched him from inside the house, the glass doors open onto the deck.
“Come and eat.” She turned and disappeared into the gloom.
Burn went inside and switched on the lights. The house was clean, hard- edged, and modern. Very much like the German rich kid who had rented it to them for six months while he went home to Stuttgart to watch his father die.
Susan carried the fillet from the kitchen, moving with that backward- leaning, splay- footed waddle of the heavily pregnant. She was beautiful. Small, blonde, with a face that stubbornly refused to admit to being twenty- eight. Aside from the huge belly, she looked exactly as she had seven years ago. He remembered the instant he first saw her, the feeling of the breath being squeezed from his lungs, his head dizzy with the knowledge that he was going to marry her. And he did, not six months later, laughing off the difference in their ages.
Book details
