Historical Gothic novel set in VENICE
Ten Great Thrillers set in South Africa
21st June 2024
South Africa stuns with its dramatic landscapes. Table Top Mountain rises above Cape Town. Safari in Kruger National Park, spotting lions, elephants, and giraffes roaming the savanna. Hike through the Drakensberg Mountains, their peaks often dusted with snow. Explore golden beaches lapped by turquoise waters, ideal for surfing or basking in the sun.
And the country has a quite disproportionate number of great thriller writers. Names such as Paul Mendelson, Deon Meyer, and Margie Orford excite and scare us with their imaginative stories.
Here are ten of our favourite South African thrillers.
Apostle Lodge by Paul Mendelson
From the author of the acclaimed The First Rule of Survival, praised by Lee Child as ‘excellent and uncompromising’, comes Paul Mendelson’s explosive latest thriller.
Apostle Lodge looks out over the ocean, an award-winning mansion built by a renowned architect. Stark and minimal, its black opaque windows hide a terrible secret. As Colonel Vaughn De Vries investigates the depraved crime committed within its walls, he believes there may be more than one killer on the loose, all with connections to a charismatic man who as a child, drowned his sister and shattered his family.
And his work is not over yet.
Cobra by Deon Meyer
Why would a mathematics professor from Cambridge University, renting a holiday home outside Cape Town, require a false identity and three bodyguards? And where is he, now that they are dead? The only clue to the bodyguards’ murder is the snake engraved on the shell casings of the bullets that killed them.
Investigating the massacre, Benny Griessel and his team find themselves being drawn into an international conspiracy with shocking implications. It seems it is not just the terrorists and criminals of Britain and South Africa who may fear the Professor’s work, but the politicians too.
As the body count begins to spiral viciously, Benny must put his new-found love life aside and focus on finding the one person who could give him a break in the case: a teenage pickpocket on the run in the city. But Benny is not the only person hunting for Tyrone Kleinbooi . . .
Relentlessly suspenseful, topical, hard-hitting and richly rewarding, COBRA is a superb novel from an author who is acclaimed around the world as a brilliant voice in crime fiction.
Dead of Night by Michael Stanley
When freelance journalist, Crystal Nguyen, heads to South Africa, she thinks she’ll be researching an article on rhino-horn smuggling for National Geographic, but within a week she’s been hunting poachers, hunted by their bosses, and then arrested in connection with a murder. And everyone is after a briefcase full of money that she doesn’t want, but can’t get rid of…
Fleeing South Africa, she goes undercover in Vietnam, trying to discover the truth before she’s exposed by the local mafia. Discovering the plot behind the money is only half the battle. Now she must convince the South African authorities to take action before it’s too late, both for the rhinos and for her. She has a powerful story to tell, if she survives long enough to tell it…
Fast-paced, relevant and chilling, Dead of Night is a stunning new thriller from Michael Stanley, author of the award-winning Detective Kubu series, introducing an intriguing new protagonist, while exposing one of the most vicious conflicts on the African continent…
The Tyranny of Trust by Neil Gevisser
In Cape Town, South Africa in 1972, Aaron meets Angela in a bar. He has no way of knowing that she has sought him out because he is a White man about to move into District Six – an area that just days before had been Black, with the reclassification causing mass enforced evictions. He’s not to know that she’s Coloured – her skin is as white as his as they disrobe – but now he has broken the law by sleeping with her and his freedom is in her hands. He’s also not to know that she’s a political assassin and probably the most dangerous woman that he’s ever likely to meet.
What he does know is that there is something bubbling under the surface in the South Africa around him and there’s an energy in the stolen house he shares with the marijuana smoke, political discourse and public expressions of the flesh. It is unseen and unheard but always threatening to build to a crescendo and blow his world apart.
Weeping Waters by Karin Brynard
Inspector Albertus Beeslaar is a traumatised cop who has abandoned tough city policing and a broken relationship in Johannesburg for a backwater post on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. But his dream of rural peace is soon shattered by the repeated attacks of a brutally efficient crime syndicate, as he struggles to train and connect with rookie local cops, Ghaap and Pyl, who resent his brusqueness and his old-school ways.
Agents of the State by Mike Nicol
BERLIN. Agent Vicki Kahn is on her first foreign mission for the South African government, on the trail of an international child-trafficker. A complication she doesn’t need is that the President’s son is somewhere in the mix. When Vicki finds her contact on the kitchen floor with a hole in the head, all her instincts tell her to get out. But her handlers have her on a tight leash, and getting out is not an option.
CAPE TOWN. A rebel colonel from the Central African Republic is taken down in a spray of bullets on the steps of the city’s oldest cathedral. Next day, Vicki’s surfer boyfriend, PI ‘Fish’ Pescado, picks up a new brief. Find out who killed my husband. Even if it was the President. A brief like that, Fish knows he should say no. Only saying no isn’t his strong point.
BAMBATHA PALACE, NATAL. The President is giving a party to celebrate his latest marriage. The great, the good and the not-so-good of the rainbow nation are all there. Also present are Agent Kahn and PI Pescado. The players are assembled. Now it’s show-time.
Blood Rose by Margie Orford
The gruesome murder of a homeless teenage boy suggests a methodical serial killer is at work in Walvis Bay, a depressed port, isolated in the vast sweep of the Namib Desert. It is a corrupt, claustrophobic place with a shifting population of people who came here only because they had to. Sent to profile the possible killer is police profiler and investigative journalist Dr Clare Hart. Working with Tamar Damases, the woman who heads up the town’s Murder Unit, Clare is glad for the distraction. Until a few days ago, her budding relationship with Captain Riedwaan Faizal seemed to be going very well indeed – but she knows she is not the only woman in his life – As the two women trace older crimes that may be related to the recent killings, they soon realise that nothing is as it seems. And as Riedwaan comes to join Clare, to help with the investigation and to try to salvage their relationship, it soon becomes clear that it is more than just their feelings that is in danger. In fact their lives – and the lives of others – are now at stake.
A Backward Blessing by Libby Young
Struggling with its past, Cape Town is a city of shifting allegiances. A place where children go missing and remain gone. Law and order is an interesting concept in the Mother City but not a helpful one. Living on the edge emotionally, rogue investigator Ray Blessing must face her own tragedy as she searches for six missing children, hoping to find part of herself in the process.
Mixed Blood by Roger Smith
The two faces of Cape Town: The sunny cosmopolitan part of Cape Town, where europeans hang out without a care: the other side where life is a huge struggle and no way out. Violence is the norm Camps Bay. John Hill, his pregnant wife Susan and their 4-year-old son Matt, are settling down to dinner in their beautiful Cape Town home. The peace is shattered when two armed men burst in on them and grab Susan, threatening her with a gun….
Random Violence by Jassy Mackenzie
In Johannesburg prosperous whites live in gated communities: when they exit their cars to open the gates, car-jackings are common. But seldom is the victim killed, much less shot twice, like Annette Botha. Piet Botha, the husband of the wealthy woman, is the primary suspect in his wife’s murder.
P.I. Jade de Jong fled South Africa ten years ago after her father was killed. Now back in town, she offers to help her father’s former assistant, Superintendent David Patel, with his investigation of this case. Under apartheid, Patel, of Indian descent, could
never have attained his present position. But he is feeling pressure from his “old line” boss with respect to this investigation and fears lingering prejudice is at work.
As Jade probes into this and other recent car-jacking cases, a pattern begins to emerge, a pattern that goes back to her father’s murder and that involves a vast and intricate series of crimes for profit.
We hope you enjoy our selection of great South African thrillers. Add any you think we may have missed in the Comments below!
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