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''This is madness, Beverly.''
She shrugs one shoulder. ''What's done is done.''
A great mystery of literature for me is : why is it so hard to create buzz around crime novels located in foreign locales? They're often great, Andrew Nette's GHOST MONEY being a good exemple. It's a strange reflex to instinctively not pick them up. An author that beat this reflex for me is Roger Smith. I buy his books, I read them before whatever I had planned AND I prefer his Cape Town thrillers to his other material. Through his eyes, South Africa becomes a noir dystopia where life is cheap and tragedy spares no one. His latest novel SACRIFICES might just be the bleakest, most twisted and very best one, yet. It has that particular type of beauty that attacks readers.
Michael Lane is a new rich, living secluded from the city in their gigantic house, thanks to the real estate savvy of his wife Beverly. He is a spineless slacker who delegates every big decision to his wife and has forsaken control of anything within his own household. The night his son Chris commits an antrocious murder in the pool house, Michael finds himself at the crossroads. Once again, he relinquished control to Beverly, who opts to protect their violent, steroid-pumping son and frame the domestic servant's son Lyndall for the murder. He's a drug addict, after all. A young, black drug addict and Beverly figures it's better to shorten his young, miserable life. But Michael is a man already living with guilt on his shoulders and these new events are disturbing the fragile balance he took years to establish.
SACRIFICES is a novel of injustice. It's another very angry Cape Town novel about how easy it is for white people to get away with murder. A character says there are two laws in the city. One for the white folks and one for the brown people. It's a part of the equation here, but this testament to injustice and murder is also an attempt to rationalize how can so many people get murdered in South Africa every year. There is a frightening number of people getting killed in this novel and I'm not talking about random bystanders. I'm talking about important characters. Deaths rack up very fast when you kill a certain cast of people nobody is really looking for. Money, status, overwhelming and incompetent police force, a domineering social elite in a country ravaged by several social issues, all these factors translate directly into deaths.
''But you'd known him all his life. It must be terribly painful?''
She's staring at him with those soulful eyes and he sees she's looking for a grief buddy, wants to conscript him into her little woundology club. He gives her his back, sliding open the door to the pool house.
The only complaint I have with SACRIFICES is the character of Chris Lane, Michael's son. His reaction to his actions is at first interesting. He seems to be trying to live his daily life without acknowledging the night of the murder, but development stops there. Chris is a bit of a one-note song, the soulless, out of control bully you're used to read about when you read about bullies. He clashes with the complex and nuanced cast Roger Smith has put together.The characters of SACRIFICES are drawn with such subtlety and details, even the character of Achmat, who is supposed to be the soulless one, comes with his very own kind of depth.
SACRIFICES reminded me of my favorite author Dennis Lehane a lot. Think Lehane meets Aeschylus. As meticulously shades and detailed as it is, the entire cast is subjugated by a powerful omen of doom. Something immaterial, that's not even on the page, but that materializes in the reader's mind after a few pages. Michael Lane and the people that revolve around him can't live a long, happy life the way they're living. Something terrible is bound to happen and you read SACRIFICES anticipating this drama, yet what Roger Smith has in mind goes beyond what you could have expected. I loved SACRIFICES, maybe more than anything else Smith has done, but it left me emotionally drained. It's both my blessing and my curse, for I live for these books who are so absorbing, they become a physical experience.
BADASS