James McClure

"Hugo Swart, faithful churchgoer and respected citizen, is found stabbed to death on the floor of his kitchen just before Christmas, on the hottest night of the year. If Mr. Swart's Reverend is to be believed, no one in the world could have a reason to kill him; the murder was most likely a robbery gone ugly, and the chief suspect is Swart's black servant, Shabalala, who has fled to the countryside. But Lieutenant Kramer suspects that not everything is as it seems. While Zondi pursues Shabalala in what turns out to be a treacherous tour of miserable outlying Bantu villages, Kramer tries to wring the truth out of some of Swart's acquaintances in Trekkersburg and Cape Town--it seems not everyone liked the victim quite as much as the Reverend did. But danger lies at every turn--what will this investigation cost the duo? McClure's merciless depiction of 1970s South Africa, its many layers of racism, and the gaps between rich and poor make this perhaps the most devourable book in the Kramer and Zondi series yet"--

Set against the hard landscape of postwar Australia and moving through the 1950s and 1960s, Snake starts with a premise as frightening and common-place as the deadly bush snake that lurks in the Australian interior: The loyal Rex, a good man, cherishes his wife Irene. Irene, bubbling over with feminine anger and unspecified desire, despises Rex. Into this marriage, this terrible emptiness, two people pour their very lives. Snake is about the loneliness of men married to unkind women, about the unloved becoming unlovable. Irene - an Australian Madame Bovary - moves through these pages like a force of nature. Chapter by brief chapter, Snake tells her story with archetypal force and subtlety - and a mesmerizing, zero-at-the-bone simplicity that literally propels the reader to the novel's stark climax.

A sardonic and civilised thriller about tough police work in rural South Africa under Apartheid. It is difficult to say anything about the ingenious and enjoyable plot without dropping spoilers, but plenty of blood is shed along the road, often in ways positively not for the squeamish. There are a couple of developments here in the saga which for fans of McClure's Kramer stories are fairly predictable, but none the less a pleasure to watch unfolding.

A fly on the wall look at a police division in Liverpool, England.