Books to Look Forward to From Orenda Books

 February 2021

Smoke Screen is by Thomas Enger and Jǿrn Lier Horst. Norway, Oslo, New Year's Eve. The annual firework celebration is rocked by an explosion, and the city is put on terrorist alert. Police officer Alexander Blix and blogger Emma Ramm are on the scene, and when a severely injured survivor is pulled from the icy harbour, she is identified as the mother of two-year-old Patricia Smeplass, who was kidnapped on her way home from kindergarten ten years earlier ... and never found. Blix and Ramm join forces to investigate the unsolved case, as public interest heightens, the terror threat is raised, and it becomes clear that Patricia's disappearance is not all that it seems..

March 2021

The New Zealand city of Dunedin is rocked when a wealthy and apparently respectable businessman is murdered in his luxurious home while his wife is bound and gagged, and forced to watch. But when Detective Sam Shephard and her team start investigating the case, they discover that the victim had links with some dubious characters. The case seems cut and dried, but Sam has other ideas. Weighed down by her dad's terminal cancer diagnosis, and by complications in her relationship with Paul, she needs a distraction, and launches her own investigation. And when another murder throws the official case into chaos, it's up to Sam to prove that the killer is someone no one could ever suspect... Bound is by Vanda Symon.

Hotel Cartagena is by Simone Buchholz. Twenty floors above the shimmering lights of the Hamburg docks, Public Prosecutor Chastity Riley is celebrating a birthday with friends in a hotel bar when twelve heavily armed men pull out guns, and take everyone hostage. Among the hostages is Konrad Hoogsmart, the hotel owner, who is being targeted by a man whose life - and family - have been destroyed by Hoogsmart's actions. With the police looking on from outside - their colleagues' lives at stake - and Chastity on the inside, increasingly ill from an unexpected case of sepsis, the stage is set for a dramatic confrontation ... and a devastating outcome for the team ... all live streamed in a terrifying bid for revenge. 

April 2021

1996. Essex. Thirteen-year-old schoolgirl Carly lives in a disenfranchised town dominated by a military base, struggling to care for her baby sister while her mum sleeps off another binge. When her squaddie brother brings food and treats, and offers an exclusive invitation to army parties, things start to look a little less bleak... 2006. London. Junior TV newsroom journalist Marie has spent six months exposing a gang of sex traffickers, but everything is derailed when New Scotland Yard announces the re-opening of Operation Andromeda, the notorious investigation into allegations of sex abuse at an army base a decade earlier... As the lives of these two characters intertwine around a single, defining event, a series of utterly chilling experiences is revealed, sparking a nail-biting race to find the truth ... and justice. The Source is by Sarah Sultoon.

Facets of Death is by Michael Stanley. Detective Kubu, renowned international detective, has faced off with death more times than he can count... But what was the case that established him as a force to be reckoned with? In Facets of Death, a prequel to the acclaimed Detective Kubu series, the fresh-faced cop gets ensnared in an international web of danger--can he get out before disaster strikes? David Bengu has always stood out from the crowd. His personality and his physique match his nickname, Kubu--Setswana for "hippopotamus"--a seemingly docile creature, but one of the deadliest in Africa. His keen mind and famous persistence have seen him rise in the Botswana CID. But how did he get his start? His resentful new colleagues are suspicious of a detective who has entered the CID straight from university, skipping the usual beat cop phase. Mining diamonds is a lucrative business, but it soon proves itself deadly. Shortly after Kubu joins the CID, the richest diamond mine in the world is robbed of 100,000 carats of diamonds in transit. The robbery is well-executed and brutal. Police immediately suspect an inside job, but there is no evidence of who it could be. When the robbers are killed execution-style in South Africa and the diamonds are still missing, the game changes, and suspicion focuses on a witch doctor and his son. Does Kubu have the skill and the integrity to engineer an international trap and catch those responsible, or will the biggest risk of his life end in disaster?

May 2021

Oslo, 1938. War is in the air and Europe is in turmoil. Hitler's Germany has occupied Austria and is threatening Czechoslovakia; there's a civil war in Spain and Mussolini reigns in Italy. When a woman turns up at the office of police-turned-private investigator Ludvig Paaske, he and his assistant - his one-time nemesis and former drug-smuggler Jack Rivers - begin a seemingly straightforward investigation into marital infidelity. But all is not what it seems, and when Jack is accused of murder, the trail leads back to the 1920s, to prohibition-era Norway, to the smugglers, sex workers and hoodlums of his criminal past ... and an extraordinary secret. The Assistant is by Kjell Ola Dahl.

Black Reed Bay is by Rod Reynolds. When a young woman makes a distressing middle-of-the-night call to 911, apparently running for her life in a quiet, exclusive beachside neighbourhood, miles from her home, everything suggests a domestic incident. Except no one has seen her since, and something doesn’t sit right with the officers at Hampstead County PD. With multiple suspects and witnesses throwing up startling inconsistencies, and interference from the top threatening the integrity of the investigation, lead detective Casey Wray is thrust into an increasingly puzzling case that looks like it’s going to have only one ending... And then the first body appears...

July 2021

Girls Who Lie is by Eva Bjorg Aegisdottir. When single mother Maríanna disappears from her home, leaving an apologetic note on the kitchen table, everyone assumes that she’s taken her own life ... until her body is found on the Grábrók lava fields seven months later, clearly the victim of murder. Her neglected fifteen-year-old daughter Hekla has been placed in foster care, but is her perfect new life hiding something sinister? Fifteen years earlier, a desperate new mother lies in a maternity ward, unable to look at her own child, the start of an odd and broken relationship that leads to a shocking tragedy. Police officer Elma and her colleagues take on the case, which becomes increasingly complex, as the number of suspects grows and new light is shed on Maríanna’s past – and the childhood of a girl who never was like the others... 

When AA meetings make her want to drink more, alcoholic murderess Maeve Beauman sets up a group for psychopaths. Psychopaths Annoymous is by Will Carver.

Africa’s under-appreciated crime fiction

As readers of African crime fiction for fifty years, and writers of it for the past fifteen, we’ve

had a chance to appreciate where it’s come from and watch where it’s reached.

While Africa has a long tradition of storytelling, it seems that African fiction writers only really came to international attention in the fifties with the writings of Nigerian Chinua Achebe and South Africans Alan Paton and Nadine Gordimer.

As far as mysteries are concerned, one really starts with James McClure’s Kramer and Zondi series of the early seventies. Not only are these darn good crime fiction plots, but the relationship between the white Lieutenant Tromp Kramer and the (smarter) black Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi illustrates and satirises the contradictions and unfairness of apartheid. At about the same time, Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote Petals of Blood set in post-colonial Kenya, but illustrating the conflict between the inherited colonial ideas and the ambient African cultural ones.

Mysteries with African settings by European writers have a longer history. Among the earliest was the first of Elspeth Huxley’s three Kenya mysteries—Murder at Government House—published in the thirties. While there is the strong sense of Africa that characterises all her books, it’s restricted to the colonial players.

So, African mysteries have some history, and over the last fifteen years there has been an explosion of authors writing contemporary crime fiction in Africa—not only in South Africa but across the continent with writers like Leye Adenle (Nigeria), Kwei Quartey (Ghana), Unity Dow (Botswana) and many others. 

How have readers elsewhere in the world reacted to this new and rich perspective on the continent?  Only a few have made the breakthrough into the international arena.  Writers from overseas who set their work here also have had a mixed reception, some successful like Alexander McCall Smith’s Mma Ramotswe series, but others who are first class cause hardly a ripple. Just as one example, take Robert Wilson’s excellent work—his Africa novels are not as popular as the ones set closer to home.

It was Deon Meyer who took up McClure’s cudgel, using crime fiction set in the post-apartheid era, albeit steeped in its aftermath, to illustrate present day South Africa.  He is probably Africa’s best known crime writer, yet even his excellent police procedurals and thrillers don’t make the same impact overseas as those of many Scandinavian writers.

It certainly isn’t the case that readers are only interested in crime fiction set in their own cultures or written originally in their own language—one only has to look at the huge success of the Nordic writers. What makes their books appealing?  Is it the weather? The cold seeping into your bones and the winter darkness seeping into your heart? Or is it a different writing style, but not too different? Or is it just that they are in fashion?

Or is it something else?

Is it perhaps that readers are reluctant to stray away from cultures they know, away from characters who are more or less like themselves?  For the last month, there has been a blog tour for our latest Detective Kubu mystery, Dying to Live.  Fortunately, the response has been overwhelmingly positive, but several of them contained a message that surprised us.  For a number of these bloggers, who are voracious readers, Dying to Live was a first or rare excursion into Africa.  Some were worried before they started reading that differences in culture would put them off or make the book difficult to read.  By the time they finished the book, far from finding it off-putting, many commented how much they enjoyed being taken to somewhere they didn’t know and to a culture that was quite different, set in the context of a good mystery.  Some said it was a welcome change to read an example of Sunshine Noir rather than Nordic Noir.

So, perhaps the main reason that African mysteries don’t get the recognition we think they deserve is nothing to do with the writer, but rather the setting.  So, how can we persuade readers to become more adventurous?

Last year at the Murder Out of Africa panel at Harrogate, we asked the audience how many of them had read an African mystery.  Only a few had.  Then an audience member commented that he hardly ever heard of African mysteries and asked us why publishers don’t select more African crime fiction books.  Deon spoke for all of us when he replied that the way to get more published with greater visibility was for people to buy more and read more of them.  A literary vicious circle.

So, we urge readers to intersperse their to-be-read piles with books set in different cultures and settings.  It will give writers from these places greater access to the wonderful reading public of the U.K., and give readers the opportunity for exciting armchair travel.

Michael and Stanley

www.detectivekubu.com

 https://web.facebook.com/MichaelStanleyBooks/

@detectivekubu

Read Robin Jarossi's review here.

Buy it from SHOTS A-Store

Michael writes a monthly piece on new African crime fiction—Africa Scene—for the International Thriller Writers The Big Thrill online magazine: http://www.thebigthrill.org/

Dying to Live by Michael Stanley (Published by Orenda Books)

The body of a Bushman is discovered near the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, and the death is written off as an accident. But all is not as it seems. An autopsy reveals that although he’s clearly very old, his internal organs are puzzlingly young. What’s more, an old bullet is lodged in one of his muscles … but where is the entry wound? When the body is stolen from the morgue and a local witch doctor is reported missing, Detective ‘Kubu’ Bengu gets involved. As Kubu and his brilliant young colleague, Detective Samantha Khama, follow the twisting trail through a confusion of rhino-horn smugglers, foreign gangsters and drugs manufacturers, the wider and more dangerous the case becomes…

Eating Bitter by Michael Stanley

Shots are delighted to welcome back to the blog the two writers Michael Sears and Stan Trollip who write the Detective Kubu Mysteries collaboratively under the name Michael Stanley. The latest novel is A Death in the Family. 

One of the reasons we set our novels in Botswana is that it gives us the freedom to explore issues in southern Africa that are not driven by the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa.  Each of the books is set against a background that is significant to the people of the region and hopefully provides the impetus for an intriguing mystery.  For example, our previous book, Deadly Harvest, focussed on the use of human body parts for black magic and the witch doctors who murder to get them.  It was the Director of the Botswana CID who encouraged us to write about these so-called muti murders because, we believe, he was frustrated by the police’s lack of success in solving them.

Our new book, A Death in the Family, revolves around the growing Chinese presence in southern Africa and its impact on the region.  The idea for this mystery came in a different way.

Stanley was on a trip through northern Namibia and Botswana.  In Namibia, he noticed that even the smallest towns had a Chinese-owned shop.  He also saw several instances of local Namibians joking with the Chinese and receiving the cold shoulder in return.

When he crossed to north-west Botswana and drove between Katchikau and Goma Bridge—a road we’ve driven several times before—he found the road now paved, with no economic reason justifying the upgrade.  Then he saw a new, small village next to the road—a Chinese village—protected by a barbed-wire fence.

“Aha,” he thought.  “Here are all the ingredients for a murder mystery.  Chinese shops are competing with locally-owned ones; the Chinese are making no attempt to integrate with the locals and are isolating themselves behind barbed wire; and the natural friendliness of the locals is being rebuffed by the Chinese.”

This was a scenario ripe with possibilities for crime writers!

After that we spent a lot of time trying to understand what was actually going on.  It turns out that Botswana has had problems with the Chinese.  Big Chinese companies had won a variety of contracts for public works; some were successful and others not so much.  For example, the new airport terminal building contract was awarded to a Sinohydro, a Chinese, state-owned company specializing in hydro engineering.  The company ran out of money and asked for more.  The government refused, so the building wasn’t completed.  Eventually, in a bad storm, the nearly-completed terminal was flooded when parts of the roof blew off.  As the joke goes, at least most of the water didn’t leak out of the structure!  Eventually the government of Botswana cancelled the project, and shortly after Sinohydro pulled out of Botswana altogether.

There is a different aspect to the story that is interesting.  Chinese companies are certainly making a big play in Africa, often leveraging cheap government money and aid packages.  They use as little local labour as possible, preferring to bring in their own people.  Sometimes those people stay on, seeing Africa as a continent where they can prosper even if initially things don’t look encouraging and the locals are not overjoyed by their presence.

In his book China’s Second Continent: How a million migrants are building a new empire in Africa, Howard French describes a journey around sub-Saharan Africa speaking to Chinese people about their views and experiences.  He has the powerful advantage of speaking the languages from many years living in China reporting for the Washington Post.  He has also lived for many years in Africa.  The people he interviews range from a single man without much capital trying to farm in rural Mozambique to people working for big Chinese companies in Ghana.  What he finds is not the construction of a new empire in a political sense, but rather a wave of immigration to what the settlers see as a continent of opportunity in commerce and farming.  Like early European settlers to Africa, these are not people who expect instant wealth or luxury.  Quite the contrary: they have a long-term view.  In the meanwhile—as they tell French—Chinese people can ‘eat bitter’, that is they can make do with very little, seeing a better future for themselves and their families.  Surprisingly, some felt that the countries to which they’ve immigrated are much less corrupt than China.

What also comes through is that the new colonists want to preserve their culture and their

language with as few outside contacts as possible.  As Stanley observed in Namibia, this can’t make for good relations.  However hard the Chinese work and however bitter they eat, the locals can hardly avoid turning on them for their success, if nothing else.

In A Death in the Family, we place a Chinese-owned mine near the small, historic village of Shoshong.  The mine wants to expand, but the local people are suspicious.  They are also divided: the older ones wanting to maintain traditional ways; the younger wanting jobs. 

At the same time Detective Kubu is struggling with the death of his beloved father, who is fatally stabbed while walking one night.  The director of the CID warns Kubu to keep away from the investigation—anything he does may taint the case—but Kubu finds this impossible.  He tries to concentrate on another case involving the apparent suicide of a senior official at the Department of Mines.  The more he digs, the more he comes to believe there is corruption in the Department—with links to the mine in Shoshong.

The director thinks Kubu is meddling in his father’s case and sends him off to New York to deliver a paper at Interpol, but mainly to get him out of the way.  But even there the trail is not cold.

Eventually the trail involves the CIA, one of the local Shoshong leaders, and, of course, the Chinese.

You can find more information about the authors and their work on their website.  You can also follow them on Twitter @detectivekubu and you can also find them on Facebook.