Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper was brought up under rough circumstances in the slums of Johannesburg, South Africa. Although mixed race, he presents as white, and managed as such to serve in the military for South Africa during WWII. But since then, he has lost and then recovered his white papers in the turbulent years of the beginning of the apartheid period of the 1950s, due to the patronage of the Afrikaner Colonel van Niekirk, for entirely selfish reasons. And with Cooper comes his best friend, Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala, a tall massive Zulu native and master tracker. And of course the third of the trio, Dr. Zweigman, Auschwitz survivor, and invaluable partner who will take on any medical emergency.
The murder they are investigating is that of a beautiful Zulu girl, of obvious quality (“Look at the soles of her feet”. points out Shabalala.) There are possible culprits galore, including the nearly feral young white son of local wealth, who escapes his boarding school from time to time and lives in the hills until the powers that be eventually manage to drag him back to the school for awhile. He found the body, and yet anytime he leaves her, there is a pillow thoughtfully laid under the dead girl’s head. Then there is the dead girl’s family. She is the daughter of a chieftain, but with several wives, matters can get complicated. It is Shabalala who furnishes the first clue when he and Cooper attended the girl’s funeral. “They buried her sitting up,” Shabalala whispers to Cooper in shocked tones. “The disrespect!” Immediately they are looking at a different set of suspects.
A wonderful examination of a complex and race-oriented world.
