News

Broken homes and crumbling empires

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On the Radar — This week we see a return to action for bestselling Ben Aaronovitch whose young adult supernatural crime has certainly found its niche, and also Roger Smith who writes an altogether darker and grittier form of ultra-violent crime fiction. There are also horns…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

City of Blood

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Written by MD Villiers — South Africa – real life there can be so brutal that for some the country hardly needs crime fiction. Yet in this milieu of racial tension, huge divisions between rich and poor, widespread substance abuse and often mindless violence, crime authors…
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KindlePrintReviews

The Plaza

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Written by Guillermo Paxton — Seventy per cent of the heroin and 90 per cent of the cocaine in the USA comes in across the country’s border with Mexico. The war on drugs has been fought for over a decade with the American government concentrating…
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KindlePrintReviews

Capture

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Written by Roger Smith — When we interviewed Roger Smith a couple of weeks ago, he told us that Capture is his darkest book yet. Can’t argue with that. This novel probes deeply into characters so broken, abused and thoroughly desperate that the voids of…
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Features

Interview: Roger Smith

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When it comes to crime fiction from southern Africa, what have you got? Well, at the one end of the spectrum there’s Alexander McCall Smith whose books deal in a light and amusing way with topics like manners and decorum, and the occasional proclivities of…
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iBookKindleReviews

Silent Valley

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Written by Malla Nunn — International crime fiction sometimes feels like a contest between the Scandinavians and the Irish. If so, the South Africans are closing ground on both of them. Think of writers like Margie Orford, Roger Smith and Mike Nicol, just to name…
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