Pale Horses
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A “gripping” crime thriller set in modern-day South Africa, by the New York Times–bestselling coauthor of Private: Gold (Publishers Weekly).
At first, the case appears to be one of simple misadventure. Sonet van Rensburg, a base jumper, falls to her death while attempting to parachute off a newly built sixty-five-story Johannesburg skyscraper. But Sonet’s jumping partner insists that this was no accident—and he hires private investigator Jade de Jong to uncover the truth.
Welcoming the distraction from her conflicted and seemingly doomed relationship with police superintendent David Patel, Jade immerses herself in the case. She discovers that Sonet worked for a charity that helped impoverished communities become self-supporting farming units. Sonet’s ex-husband, though, has nothing good to say about his wife or the work she has done. He tells Jade that Sonet’s efforts were a useless waste of money and that the farming projects were not sustainable. When Jade travels out to the Siyabonga community’s farm in Limpopo, hoping to prove him wrong, she finds it not just abandoned, but razed to the ground. Digging deeper for answers about where the residents went and why they left their fertile valley, Jade begins to uncover a complex and twisted truth . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The death of aid worker Sonet Meintjies, who took a fatal plunge from a Johannesburg high-rise, propels Mackenzie's gripping fourth thriller featuring flinty South African PI Jade de Jong (after 2012's The Fallen). Red flags start popping up almost immediately when Jade discovers that a tribal farming community whose members Sonet was mentoring has vanished without a trace as has Sonet's sister, Zelda, a muckraking journalist. With bullets whizzing and bodies falling, Jade contacts her on-again, off-again lover, Supt. David Patel, even though he has problems of his own between his bitchy pregnant wife and anonymous threats. As the novel hurtles toward a devastating climax, Mackenzie pumps up the suspense with a secondary but eventually intersecting story line centering on Ntombi Khumalo, a gutsy widow and mother who proves every bit as intrepid as Jade. Despite giving readers such appealing women to root for, Mackenzie paints a decidedly dystopian view of contemporary South Africa.