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The October Killings (2011)

by Wessel Ebersohn(Favorite Author)

3.44 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0312655959 (ISBN13: 9780312655952)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Minotaur Books

series

Yudel Gordon

review 1: Hmm, not as good as I thought it would be. The setting is new to me, but details of landscape and environmental atmosphere are not exploited for what they might add to the story. The politics are hard to keep straight, but that's the point of this look into pre- and post-Apartheid history. The main thing I minded is that the device of keeping the deep dark secret that the protagonist won't tell anyone throughout most of the novel is all too obvious. We keep being told that she can't say it yet and that makes it feel too much like an authorial device. I would read a second book in the series and expect it to perhaps be a bit better. There are many points of interest in the book, but the writing and not-very-deep characterizations left me feeling..... more.meh.
review 2: Abigail Bakula heads up the gender desk in South Africa’s Justice Department in 2005 and her husband is a prominent newspaper editor. But when a hero’s name surfaces at work, she’s plunged right back to the night 20 years before when she, age 15, watched her father die in a raid on an ANC safe house.When a frightened white man, Leon Lourens, comes to see her in fear for his life and tells her that members of the apartheid-government security squad present that night are being ritually executed one by one on the anniversary of the raid, Bakula needs no reminding as to who Lourens is.He’s the man who saved her life, standing up to his captain, Marinus van Jaarsveld, who is currently spending his days in maximum security at Pretoria Central Prison, having rejected the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and sworn to uphold his apartheid principles.Feeling a chill to her deepest core, Bakula determines to save Lourens. But that’s not the whole story and Bakula won’t share the rest of it, not even with her husband.Bakula teams up with a brilliant, eccentric veteran prison psychologist, Yudel Gordon (featured in a previous Ebersohn series set in the 1980s), to track down the killer in time to save Lourens. As time grows short the pace speeds up, but even more than action, the interest lies in the contrast between South Africa then and now – in some ways not so different, in others completely changed.This is a character-driven narrative and Bakula is an interesting heroine in part because of her elite background. She spent most of her youth in private schools outside of South Africa, and is as frightened of township gangs as any middle-class white lady would be. But she is also brave and loyal and stubborn and willing to push against the barriers of her fears.Cape Town writer Ebersohn has captured the strange, tortured, violent, backward-harking and forward-thinking place that is South Africa and readers will hope that Gordon and Bakula return soon. less

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