Jennifer Palmer has read crime fiction since her teenage years & enjoys reviewing within the many sub-genres that now exist; as a historian who lectures on real life historical mysteries she particularly appreciates historical cime fiction.
In South Africa a rich young man inadvertently and unintentionally kills a street girl while drunkenly backing his car. The tough policeman, Turner, works to bring justice to the dead girl despite having to fight a powerful combination of deadly macho enemies.
A teenage street girl in South Africa is badly injured - backed into by a Range Rover and fatally crushed. Dirk, the young man driving the car, is drunk and doesn’t know what he has done: his companions realise but choose to leave the girl to die. Turner, the homicide detective who gets the case of the dead girl pursues it, relentlessly.
The group around the young man are wealthy and privileged - they also seem uniformly unpleasant. They are described with visceral accuracy. His mother, Margot Le Roux, is a very wealthy mine owner and her mines are centred on a remote town called Langkopf which is hers totally. No independent police exists there. The remoteness and loneliness of the town in the desert is beautifully delineated.
In true White the Knight fashion Warrant Officer Turner chooses to pursue this case and travels to the town of Langkopf - there, as you would expect, he meets trouble.
This is a thriller and it follows the usual pattern of multiple destruction. What is different is the poetic responses of some to death and the realisation of the protagonist that he is, despite his belief in his own integrity - ultimately partly responsible for that swathe of destruction. Though a warning for the weak of heart – the tally of deaths is sickening and each is described in visceral [and perhaps too much] detail.
