Sonja van der Westhuizen

The Waiting Rooms by Eve Smith

14 May, 2020

Over the past few months our world has changed in ways most of us could never have anticipated. During the Covid-19 pandemic readers might fall in two categories. There are those who gravitate towards books about disasters and dystopian worlds, and those who avoid them…

iBook Kindle Print Reviews

The Mist by Ragnar Jonasson

By Sonja van der Westhuizen

11 May, 2020

Translated by Victoria Cribb — The Mist completes – or starts, depending on how you read it – Ragnar Jonasson’s Hidden Iceland series. The first in the series, The Darkness, introduced us to Hulda Hermansdottir, a police detective on the verge of retiring from the…

iBook Kindle Print Reviews

Wild Dog by Serge Joncour

By Sonja van der Westhuizen

11 April, 2020

Translated by Jane Aitken & Polly Mackintosh — Novelist and screenwriter Serge Joncour brings us a dual narrative set in a small, rural town high up in the French mountains with Wild Dog, his first novel to appear in English. The year is 2017 and…

iBook Kindle Print Reviews

Little Disasters by Sarah Vaughan

By Sonja van der Westhuizen

7 April, 2020

According to NHS statistics, postnatal depression affects more than one in 20 women within a year of giving birth. In Little Disasters, Sarah Vaughan takes on the unspoken, often stigmatised occurrence of postnatal depression and its potentially devastating effects. Liz Trenchard is senior registrar in…

iBook Kindle Print Reviews

The Vault

By Sonja van der Westhuizen

6 February, 2020

Written by Mark Dawson — Set only a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, The Vault is a standalone spy thriller with all the standard, but essential elements of the sub-genre – MI6, double agents and covert operations with plenty…

Book Club

Unknown Male

By Sonja van der Westhuizen

20 January, 2020

Unknown Male is the third in Nicholás Obregón’s Inspector Iwata series and sees the detective return from his exile in Los Angeles to investigate the murder of a British exchange student in Tokyo’s seedy underworld. Initially Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police suspect a connection with the murders…

iBook Kindle Print Reviews

Unknown Male

By Sonja van der Westhuizen

23 December, 2019

Written by Nicholás Obregón — Unknown Male is the third in the Inspector Iwata series which began in 2017 with Blue Light Yokahama. The series was conceived by Obregón while he was travelling on a bullet train from Hiroshima to Kyoto, and, like the earlier…

Features