Smuggler Kingpin is a fast-moving political thriller with something more serious on its mind. Set against the turbulent backdrop of modern southern Africa, it mixes organised crime, political corruption, espionage and old-fashioned adventure into a story that often feels uncomfortably close to current day headlines.
At the centre of the novel is Sidney Reilly, a wealthy and well-connected Zimbabwean businessman whose respectable public face conceals a much darker operation. Tobacco and gold smuggling, money laundering and political influence have helped create an empire stretching across borders and into the corridors of power. Reilly is rich, protected and seemingly untouchable.
Trying to bring him down is a colourful group of characters familiar to readers of Hain’s previous thrillers. There is Thandi Matjeke, the committed young South African activist; her experienced mentor, known as the Veteran; Security Minister Yasmin; and the enigmatic Sniper. It does work well as a standalone.
Thandi makes a particularly engaging heroine. Brave and idealistic but by no means invulnerable, she belongs to a generation that did not experience apartheid first-hand but has inherited both the freedoms won by the struggle and the problems that followed. That contrast between the hopes of the past and the realities of the present gives the novel much of its emotional weight.
Hain wastes little time putting her in danger. A clandestine meeting at Victoria Falls introduces an atmosphere of surveillance and suspicion, and the stakes steadily rise as the investigation moves closer to Reilly and his associates. Yet this is not simply a thriller about heroes pursuing villains. The real enemy is something much larger: a network in which crime, business and politics have become dangerously intertwined.
Reilly’s operations involve an extraordinary web of gold refineries, cash-transport businesses, banks, diplomats and money launderers. Vast sums can be moved offshore while apparently legitimate businesses provide cover for what is happening underneath. At the same time, Yasmin discovers just how difficult it is to fight organised crime when corruption may reach into the police, prosecution services, prisons and other institutions supposedly responsible for upholding the law.
Hain clearly knows this world. A former anti-apartheid campaigner and British cabinet minister, he brings a convincing understanding of southern African politics to the story. The result is a thriller with considerably more substance than the usual tale of criminal kingpins and secret operations.
Occasionally, that knowledge threatens to slow things down. Hain is keen to explain the mechanics of money laundering, gold and tobacco smuggling and political corruption, and some passages contain more detail than the average thriller requires. But there is a payoff: Reilly’s criminal empire feels credible precisely because we understand how it works.
And Reilly himself is more interesting than a conventional villain. Hain gives us glimpses of the experiences and relationships that shaped him without asking us to excuse what he has become. His power comes not merely from armed protection but from money, influence and the knowledge that powerful people have reasons to keep him safe.
The tension therefore comes from a simple question: how do you catch a man when the system that should catch him may already be compromised?
Hain keeps that question alive as the various strands of the story begin to converge, while wisely saving the novel’s biggest surprises for its later stages.
Smuggler Kingpin is an entertaining thriller, but it is also an angry one. Beneath the gunmen, secret meetings and criminal manoeuvring is a warning about what happens when corruption becomes normalised and public institutions begin to fail.
I found this a gripping, topical and impressively informed thriller in which the most frightening villain may not be the kingpin himself, but the corrupt system that allows him to flourish. There is a lot to enjoy in this book.
