This is the last of series I’ve been reading starring Detective Sergeant Cooper, Detective Constable Shabalala, and Doctor Zweigman in 1950s apartheid South Africa, or, as I have come to think of them, as Kirk, Spock and Bones (assuming Spock were a family man). It is that family that is in the thick of this book. Shabalala’s teen aged son has been accused of the murder of a white couple by their teenaged daughter. That seems to be hard to believe, but she is sticking to her story, and the son is refusing to give an alibi, and it is just about the Christmas holiday season, and the police force just basically wants to get out of town and on to vacation.
To further complicate matters, the suspect, Aaron Shabalala, Samuel Constable’s youngest son, was essentially adopted by Samuel’s brother after he had lost his own son. It’s been awhile. Aaron is being brought up in comfortable conditions, and has been attending a posh boy’s school, but still. The murdered couple had been connected with the school, and were entertaining various young men with the intent of assisting them to get ahead in this newly racist society. But not everyone in the family agrees politically.
And then there is the corrupt conspiracy within the Detective Branch, who has all the reasons in the world to use this convenient perpetrator. Not to mention that events are conspiring to drag Cooper back to his not-entirely-innocent rough upbringing in the racially mixed slums of Sophiatown. a past he has desperately tried to evade.
Gonna miss these guys.
