South African thriller a fab page-turner

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/06/2022 (1568 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

South Africa’s two most brilliant and incorruptible police detectives have been demoted and dumped in the back end of beyond for the crime in their last book of uncovering government corruption — but at least Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido are still alive.

Their only hope is to keep their mouths shut and noses clean until the next presidential election and hold their breath that things may change for the better — that would make for a really exciting book, eh?

Not to worry. The gangbusting coppers swallow their humiliation in being dispatched to a local college where a straight-laced computer nerd lad leaves the dorm Friday night and isn’t back Monday morning. Spoiler alert: they’re soon picking up the scent of a mysterious but hard-to-figure-out-what-smells-so-off crime.

Meanwhile, they’re receiving anonymous letters from someone who may be a police officer — just as gangsters ambush and murder an idealistic young cop.

Concomitantly, we meet a young mother working as a real estate agent; she’s heavily in debt, commissioned to sell a mega-mansion for a secret owner, a creepy misogynist swindler who cost hundreds of South Africans their life savings while keeping his plunder through a maze of numbered companies and offshore accounts.

If this is your first murder mystery, a hint: disparate unconnected plot threads tend to bump into each other in the last third of the book.

This is Deon Meyer’s eighth Benny Griessel book among his 17 works of fiction — and they’re darned good. They’re translated from Afrikaans, this one by K.L. Seegers, but The Dark Flood doesn’t feel stilted, the bane of some translated novels. Rather, it flows with the profane vernacular of veteran cops, peppered somewhat incongruously with untranslated Afrikaans expressions here and there.

Meyer’s books have been published in 27 languages, but he’s writing for South Africans. He doesn’t pander to foreigners with an explanation here, a footnote there, an aside for context. You’re on your own for the geography — his priority readers know where the major cities are in relation to each other, they know the towns, the mountains, the highways, they know if a certain place is affluent, they know if a suburb is dodgy.

The word apartheid never appears, nor do the names of real people who’ve lived since the Boer War.

Superficially, it’s not about race — not overtly, although it’s there every minute, lurking. Meyer doesn’t tell us a character’s race — Griessel is white, Cupido Black — and it can’t always be inferred from a name. Blacks informally call each other brother, sister, aunt, uncle, a subtle way of informing readers.

One young person of interest says he did a runner because that’s what young Black men do when the cops come looking — leaving unsaid that the cops were both Black and white.

Is the South African government as corrupt as Meyer depicts it? He lives there, he hasn’t been jailed, hasn’t been sued penniless. Those of us who haven’t paid South Africa much heed since Nelson Mandela died aren’t qualified to judge.

The Dark Flood is a superb police procedural. The plot, well, the less you know the better, but it’s a rather ingenious whydunit.

That real estate agent and the sleazeball financier — Meyer doesn’t give us any easy answers about what’s really going on, what’ll happen next, but it’s kind of Hitchcockian, and a really neat juxtaposition with Benny and Vaughn.

The flood, dark or otherwise? Just read.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin wishes he’d kept an atlas handy as he read. What is this Google Maps of which you speak?