Detective Inspector Benny Griessel, a highly experienced white investigator of Boer descent, is assigned to the case. He is ordered to include a newly hired group of police officers all of whom are black or mixed-race in the investigation, as part of post-apartheid South Africa's affirmative action policies. Meyer's perceptive, realistic and often funny references to the resulting personal conflicts lift the novel above cultural stereotypes and will not be unfamiliar to Western readers.
Vusi Vusumuzi Ndabeni, a Xhosa who previously worked in the crime-ridden Khayelitsha township adjacent to Capetown, is determined to learn everything he can from his mentor to help solve this important case. But at the crime scene he is already distracted when he meets the attractive, young 'coloured' forensic investigator and wonders whether "a coloured doctor would go out with a darky cop?"
Another officer, who is 'coloured' is consumed by his resentment that "I'm not white enough, I'm a 'hotnot'" (a derogatory term for mixed race — Meyer has a useful glossary in an index) which affects all his relationships with both his police colleagues and the white witnesses he meets as he investigates a second murder, that of a celebrity in the emerging Afrikaans music industry, which seems only remotely connected with the first.
And when Mbali Kaleni, a Zulu female officer joins the investigative team, the complications and suspense multiply. Kaleni's fellow officers describe her as an unattractive woman who dresses in too tight black trouser suits and always smells of Kentucky Fried Chicken, her favorite food.
She "irritates the living hell" out of her male colleagues who refer to her as a "bra-burning feminist," but they must "eat crow" when her intelligence, bravery and persistence lead her to see clues that they miss which are central in solving the young American girl's murder. By the novel's end we've learned some very interesting things about the South African drug trade; lawless Russian businessmen; sex trafficking; and the trade in human organs but it is the hair raising conclusion to the young American's murder investigation that keeps us on the edge of our seat.
It takes Griessel and his team only thirteen hours to solve the cases; it will take a little longer to finish the novel but you'll love every minute of it.
Mark of the Lion is an historical mystery that takes place in colonial Kenya in the 1920s and features Jade Cameron, a feisty, persistent and courageous young American woman who was an ambulance driver in France in WWI, as the central investigator. At the war's end Jade's close friend David dies in her arms and makes her promise to look for his brother in Kenya, a brother he has only recently discovered he had. Using her wartime English connections Jade travels to Nairobi and under the guise of being a travel writer and photographer, begins her search. She finds out early on that David's father has died in Nairobi under peculiar circumstances and was perhaps even murdered.
The mystery deepens as Jade's network expands; mostly made up of English expatriates, some of whom become her friends, others who are more skeptical of her interests.
The exoticism of Kenya works in several ways to engage us in the story. Jade herself, as a persistent and outspoken American who treats Africans like individuals refuses to take on the English master/servant relationship and is exotic to many of the elite English people she meets in Happy Valley. And they are, of course, exotic in their own way — to the Africans they must relate to and — as arrogant racists — to Jade herself.
A third element of exoticism, which to my great surprise, was authentically captured and in no way demeaned its practitioners was the description of some Kikuyu witchcraft rituals involving spiritual contacts with hyenas. The author makes it all fit and has clearly done her anthropological homework.
As Jade's investigations expand, so do the mysteries, the murders, and the building of suspense. The discovery of a cache of valuable gems and ultimately of David's brother builds up through complicated situations that keep us reading. The vivid descriptions of Kenya's terrain also hold our attention and by the end of the novel we are eagerly looking forward to meeting Jade Cameron on her next investigation.
© 2015 Serena Nanda for SeniorWomen.com
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