South Africa has some of the most talented crime writers in the world and Wessel Ebersohn proves he is right up there with the best of them in his latest thriller which once again pairs the elderly Jewish prison psychologist Yudel Gordon and the young black lawyer Abigail Bukula.
Enslin Kruger, the most powerful prisoner in Pretoria’s C Max, is dying, but before he goes he wants to revenge himself on Yudel Gordon and to pass on his ‘crown’: he combines the two by setting his successors a competition to murder Yudel’s protégé, the prize being becoming the new prison boss.
Beloved Childe is a beautiful American prison researcher who bewitches Yudel and has him eating out of her hand, making herself up an obvious target: against protocol, she is allowed to visit Kruger’s lieutenant, Oliver Hall, shortly before his release.
Hall is charged with her murder but so is a rival gang leader, Elia Dlomo, who breaks out of prison to achieve his goal. Beloved meanwhile moves to Cape Town and seemingly vanishes while the ruthless killers are on her trail and so, belatedly, is Yudel, with the help of Abigail.
Unbeknown to everyone, Beloved has a past, and Enslin is not the only one capable of plotting an elaborate revenge… Rather than give more away, suffice it to say the only South African prison more dreaded than C Max is the top security lock up in Kokstad. By the end of the book, there is another inmate headed in that direction.
This is the third in the Gordon-Bukula partnership and every bit as exciting and thrilling as the previous two. ( )