Deon Meyer. Thirteen Hours. 2010. Vintage Canada Edition, 2011.
(Another in-house grab) The streets of Capetown are a whole 'nother venue! This novel, this author, are revelations. Inspector Benny Greissler spends as much time fighting bureaucracy as he does crime. Elevated to supervising new detectives, Benny's involved with the early morning murder of a young American backpacker, Erin Russel—a case for Inspector Vusi Ndareni. The scary young killers, unknown to the cops yet, are not finished, chasing her friend Rachel. A second case crops up that morning with Inspector Fransman Dekker in charge: music record executive Adam Barnard found shot to death beside his drunk, oblivious wife Alexa. The two being minor celebrities attracts an unruly media crowd; Dekker and Benny also face Barnard's hostile business partner who accuses one of their clients. How many people are lying about Barnard's death? But the missing foreign tourist ranks highest for attention and it takes agonizingly long to organize a proper search.
The book could have been subtitled Who's in Charge Here? Quarrelling police departments, dithering bosses, reluctant colleagues, snarled traffic, and a power blackout waste more time for implementing actions. At this point I will say that South Africa is a different world, at least in police perspective; social discrimination still affects attitudes to varied skin colours and tribal differences. The liberal use of Afrikaans terminology (except fokkol which apparently means exactly as it sounds) is unfamiliar. While terrified Rachel hides and runs, runs and hides, Inspector Mdali Kaleni is appointed to assist Vusi—she the object of workforce bullying and obesity shaming.
Why were the two girls targeted? Under all the chaotic activity and numerous threads is a literary structure geared to the most intense suspense you can imagine. We live with the detectives and their frustrations on all levels. The recording industry is turned inside out. Character insights and social commentary are smoothly integrated. Even Benny's pathetic domestic life is not ignored. The race to beat the killers to Rachel is heart pounding. It's a very, very busy thirteen hours alternating between two cases and four hectic cops; truly an outstanding work of the genre.
Rachel
▪ She wanted to rest, she wanted to catch her breath and try to control her terror. (12)
▪ Far off, just where the road curled over the flank of the mountain, stood two of them. Small, watchful figures, one with a cell phone to his ear. (32)
▪ She must get down to where there were people; she had to get help. Somewhere someone must be prepared to listen and to help. (57)
▪ Then one of them began to turn. The one who had started it all. The one who had bent over Erin with the knife. (81)
▪ "Daddy, you have to help me. They want to kill me too." (112)
▪ One eye was swollen shut, the other would not focus, her vision was blurred. Four people were holding her down. (285)
Bits
▪ "Mrs. Barnard," said Dekker stiffly and formally, "I get the impression that your husband's death hasn't upset you very much." (54)
▪ "He can't curb his bloody ambition and if I try to cover for him they say it's because he's a fucking hotnot just like me, and I only look after my own people, where the fuck are you, anyway?" (85)
▪ "I have been a policeman for over twenty-five years, Fransman, and I'm telling you now, they will always treat you like a dog, the people, the press, the bosses, politicians, regardless of whether you are black, white or brown." (175)
▪ "Benny, you're my safety net, my supervisor. Just keep an eye, check the crime scene management, don't let them miss suspects." (176)
▪ "They're looking for something, Vusi, the fuckers are looking for something the girls have. That's why Rachel is still alive." (309)
▪ Vusi's hand dropped to his service pistol, took hold of it and pulled it out. He lifted his left hand to open the door and saw how it was shaking, realised his heart was beating wildly and his breathing was shallow, almost panicky. (340)
William Boyd. Gabriel's Moon. NY: First Grove Atlantic, 2024.
Gabriel Dax: English travel writer/journalist, insomniac. In the 1960s after a visit to Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabriel's interview with new leader Patrice Lumumba excites newspaper interest, but Lumumba is kidnapped by rebels, and the article was never published. Gabriel notices that his London flat was disturbed while he was away. Odd events begin that he doesn't fully understand: an MI6 agent called Faith Green asks him to perform a small favour for them in Spain; a chance flirtation there with Nancy-Jo Berndlinger almost lands him in jail; someone is following him; when Nancy-Jo comes to London, she's soon found dead of a drug overdose. Later during his second, similar trip to Spain he spontaneously risks a dangerous act with his contact Caldwell, unknown to Faith. By now the world is sure that Lumumba was assassinated.
Even though Gabriel doesn't want to know the ultimate purposes of Faith's requests, he feels he's being constantly watched. Overtures are made demanding his notes and tapes of that DRC interview, where Lumumba named several people who wanted to kill him. Gabriel ignores them, working on his latest book and paying several visits to shrink Dr Katerina Haas, in hope of curing his insomnia; he knows the tragic fire that destroyed his childhood home and killed his mother is at the root of it. So it becomes a mission to investigate what was known about the circumstances at the time—when he was a traumatized six-year-old. Does his brother Sefton know something he doesn't? And as his obsession with Faith increases, he wonders if anything in his life really happens by chance.
Gabriel's Moon is not a thriller in any breathless sense. It's a subtle playbook of recruitment and commitment of Cold War spies, how one man's relatively mild existence becomes complicit in international events never knowing exactly what purpose lies beyond his small part. Author Boyd neatly dovetails with Congo uprisings and the Cuban missile crisis.
Words:
anamnesis = personal medical history; ability to recall past occurrences
vermiculated = worm-eaten
refulgent = luminous, shining
Fragments
▪ Some days in life are simply like this, he told himself, strange auguries of the world's ambivalence. (17)
▪ "And not everyone thinks he's, you know, the great, coming man that you portrayed. The Congo's messy. Very. Lots of vested interests, lots of flashpoints." (25)
▪ "I go to sleep and then I dream of fire, fires burning. I wake. I can't get back to sleep." (39)
▪ "Discover the memories you don't know you have. This knowledge will eradicate your mind disorder and your insomnia will be gone." (54)
▪ "Queneau told me that these names," he continued, "lead directly to the door of former President Eisenhower." (109)
▪ He was like a man in an ever-widening, ever-vermiculated labyrinth, he decided, but one with no exit. He was becoming increasingly worried as he became increasingly implicated. (139)
▪ "OUR USELESS SECRET SERVICE! TOP SPY FLEES TO MOSCOW!" [newspaper headlines](154)
▪ As he thought further about the choice he'd made in Cádiz, he saw it as the one recourse he'd had available to him to establish his own individuality, his independence as a thinking, functioning human being. (155)
▪ "I never know what's going on," Bennet said. "And I don't want to know. I just follow instructions." (195)