It is not unusual for a character in a mystery story to have a
violent past. In Gillain Slovo's post-apartheid Africa, everyone is
tainted by the country's terrible history, including the main
character, Sarah Barcant, a prosecuting attorney who has chosen to
live in New York, far away from the small, troubled town where she
grew up. When Sarah's mentor calls her back to South Africa to work
on a case for the Truth Commission, she confronts a world where the
rules may have changed, but the game is still about choosing sides
and sticking to them.

The reader will never doubt that activist Steve Sizela was beaten
to death by the police. But how will Sarah get the defendants to
acknowledge their guilt? Given the unlikelihood of the police
testifying against each other and the questionable reliability of
Alex Mpondo, Sizela's friend, fellow victim, and eyewitness to his
imprisonment, how will Sarah reveal the truth when they've never
even found Steve Sizela's body?

The pain in this book is quite real. It's easy to believe that the
Sizelas simply want to bury their son, and it's clear that the
families of the tortured and of the torturers live their own
punishments. Ms. Slovo illustrates particularly well the subtle and
permanent effects of political torture on the marriages of those
involved as either victims or perpetrators. Alex Mpondo's anguish,
when it dawns on him that he may have betrayed his friend to his
death, is incalculable.

Oddly, it is Sarah, who ought to be the most familiar and
accessible character in the book, who proves the biggest cipher. At
one point she muses, "Sure, she knew she was good at her job, and
sure, she also knew that most indigenous prosecutors would be too
implicated by the past either to be interested in the case or to do
it justice. But even so, the country was teeming with lawyers, many
of whom would have been happy, and more than competent, to take on
the case." So why is she there? Her family has moved away, she
herself has no special history with the anti-apartheid movement,
and nobody --- not even her mentor who hopes she will stay in South
Africa permanently --- seems to like her very much. Placing a
character with so little at stake in the center of a story where
everyone else has so much diminishes the intensity of the important
issues Ms. Slovo has chosen to explore.

   --- Review by Colleen Quinn