THE FALLEN

This is an action-packed thriller set in South Africa.  Jade de Jong is a private investigator with a string of successful cases behind her.  Her boyfriend is a police superintendent of Indian descent.  They have decided to take a short holiday break at St. Lucia, an Indian Ocean coastal resort, to do some scuba diving, Jade has never told David about her fear of deep water, which she is determined to overcome, as she arrives in the resort a few days before David.  She takes lessons with a pleasant diving instructor named Amanda and finds it hard going.

David arrives and delivers a bombshell.  He has slept with his estranged wife, from whom he has been separated for some time, and she is pregnant.  He feels duty-bound to go back to her.  Jade is understandably very put out, but they have to shelve their differences the next day when Amanda is found brutally murdered.

At the same time, in Johannesburg, a man named Themba Msamaya is also  murdered – why we don’t know.  At the resort, there is another diving instructor called Monique, who has a habit of getting involved with every man who crosses her path, and consequently makes many enemies.  She is also clearly afraid of something and lives in the chalet next to Amanda’s.  Jade and David quickly assume that the killer killed the wrong girl by mistake, but as Monique has clearly left the resort in a hurry, are unable to confirm this.

Jade has also become friendly with (and is attracted to) an ecologist named Craig, who is doing fieldwork in the adjacent nature reserve and who is living with a woman named Elsabe. He claims she is not a live-in lover but someone he met when both of them were in a town called Freedom identifying the bodies of relatives who had died in a horrific air crash not long ago.  There is also another thread in the plot concerning a certain Bradley who is being employed by some extremely ruthless individuals to carry out an undisclosed engineering task.  We have no idea how this is going to be linked in with the rest of the story – as yet.

This is a very complicated plot, ultimately involving  mass murder and ecological disaster.  The tension is maintained throughout and it grips the reader (this one at any rate) right until the tremendous cliff-hanger of an ending.