Christmas crime: Blood Safari by Deon Meyer (translated by K L Seegers)

I've been finding it a bit hard to come up with entries for Kerrie's "suggest a Christmas title" collection because I don't read books with an explicitly Christmas theme, rather I find that I am (occasionally) reading a book which turns out to be set in part at Christmas. I read one of these recently, Blood Safari by Deon Meyer, and fortuitously my review of this book was published earlier this week at Euro Crime. My review starts:

"BLOOD SAFARI, originally written in Afrikaans, is an excellent thriller which held me completely entranced from the moment I opened it and read the first page. I'm a sucker for many of its themes, not least the damaged loner protagonist Lemmer, an ex-con now working as a bodyguard for a company called Body Armour, owned and run by Jeanette Louw, one of the most original owners of a security company I've come across in my reading travels.
Lemmer is renovating his house in a small, neighbourly town of Loxton, South Africa. He's knocking down a wall on Christmas day when Jeanette phones him to offer him a job as bodyguard to rich “brand consultant” Emma le Roux. Emma's house was broken into and she was attacked by three armed, masked men a few days previously, barely escaping with her life...."

Read on at Euro Crime for the rest of my review, and do let me highly recommend this superb thriller/detective story. Although the main events take place over the holiday period, you won't find many, if any, Christmas trees, and not a leg of turkey or sprig of mistletoe in sight.

Deon Meyer website.

Karen Meek's review of Devil's Peak(audiobook) by Deon Meyer (tr. K L Seegers).

Bernadette's review of Devil's Peak.

Euro Crime - reviews and news about European (including British) crime fiction. 

Contribute to Kerrie's suggest a Christmas title collection.

Comments

[Kerrie]

Thanks for this contribution Maxine. I'm listenting to The Devil's Peak at the moment and enjoying it very much,

[Dorte H]

I had already found your review of this one today ;)

I am looking for African crime (you may be able to guess why), but my problem is that the two I am interested in are both from South Africa (this one by Meyer and Margie Orford, Blood Rose). Well, some problems will have to wait for January.

[Maxine]

Does Alexander McCall Smith (Botswana), count, Dorte? You might like to take a look at True Murder (en route to you) as the author is African (Ghanian?) and though the book is set in England the protag is African and much of the plot is inflenced by that continent. As is so often the case with books about this continent, I did not discover which African country the characters come from, but perhaps I did not look hard enough. (I only realised I didn;t know the country after I finished reading it, so skimmed through the book again to try to find it for the purposes of the review, and failed).

[Dorte H]

Oh? That sounds great. I will keep an eye out for the postmand :D

I have just checked that McCall Smith was in fact born in Zimbabwe so he certainly counts. I am not going to decide how other participants should solve these little geographical disputes in the challenge, but personally I am going for authors who live or have lived in the continent in question.