| Publisher | Hodder & Stoughton |
|---|---|
| Date Published | 14 April 2022 |
| ISBN-10 | 1529375517 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1529375510 |
| Format | hardcover |
| Pages | 416 |
| Price | £ 18.99 |
The Dark Flood
by
Benny Griessel and his partner Vaughn Cupido have been demoted from the Hawks – South Africa’s elite police unit – to a rural force. As they struggle to make sense of the job and life’s unfair twists and turns, it seems solving cases is the least of their problems.
Review
I have been reading Deon Meyer since his first UK publication, and I rejoice every time a new one arrives. Time is cleared, other books are set aside, quiet please … I am reading a master storyteller and back with old friends whose lives never seem to get easier but are every bit as exciting as I might want.
An impoverished student at the university has disappeared. He kept himself to himself, made no friends, had a low profile, but is a computer genius and a possible hacker. No one knows anything more about him. Bit by bit they chip away at his life and slowly big money comes into sight, as do guns and gangs.
Across town, an attractive estate agent is trying to keep her family ahead of the debt collectors. If she can just close a new deal worth millions, she will be free to start her own agency and keep the girls in school while her academic husband can finish his book. Her new client, however, is an infamous fraudster and sex pest. She has to stay one step ahead of him in his world of bluffers, gamblers and money men. Then the unthinkable happens, and things take a massive turn for the worse.
Griessel and Cupido are split up, Vaughn to stay with the missing student, and Benny to work on a new case, that of a missing billionaire. Where these two cases coincide is where politics, banks, thieves, deals and - when the gun start shooting - lives are won and lost.
The Dark Flood is multi-layered; humane, brilliantly constructed, funny, politically astute and revealing about the complicated lives, many languages and prejudices of modern South Africa. I very badly want my own ground-hog day now, so that I can read and re-read this glorious, clever book and take from it the same new enjoyment every time.
Benny Griessel, a captain in the Hawks elite crime fighting force in South Africa, is dogged, instinctual, hounded by his alcohol demons, respected by his peers and feared by the criminal fraternity. But despite all that, he’s been demoted and thrown out of the Hawks for a moment of misjudged policing. With him goes his partner, the loud, large, impulsive and fiercely loyal Captain Vaughn Cupido.
They are heading for the policing wilderness but somehow end up in Stellenbosch - a rich city where money is made in huge quantities and where that money can be used to keep secrets very quiet. The two detectives have no idea why they are there and not the promised backwater and now their first case looks like it is going nowhere.
An impoverished student at the university has disappeared. He kept himself to himself, made no friends, had a low profile, but is a computer genius and a possible hacker. No one knows anything more about him. Bit by bit they chip away at his life and slowly big money comes into sight, as do guns and gangs.
Across town, an attractive estate agent is trying to keep her family ahead of the debt collectors. If she can just close a new deal worth millions, she will be free to start her own agency and keep the girls in school while her academic husband can finish his book. Her new client, however, is an infamous fraudster and sex pest. She has to stay one step ahead of him in his world of bluffers, gamblers and money men. Then the unthinkable happens, and things take a massive turn for the worse.
Griessel and Cupido are split up, Vaughn to stay with the missing student, and Benny to work on a new case, that of a missing billionaire. Where these two cases coincide is where politics, banks, thieves, deals and - when the gun start shooting - lives are won and lost.
The Dark Flood is multi-layered; humane, brilliantly constructed, funny, politically astute and revealing about the complicated lives, many languages and prejudices of modern South Africa. I very badly want my own ground-hog day now, so that I can read and re-read this glorious, clever book and take from it the same new enjoyment every time.
Reviewed 30 September 2022 by Kerry Hood
Kerry Hood has worked in publishing for many years and lived in London for just as many, but suspects her heart is in the country.
