And so the story goes every stone Cooper turns over only displays more stones. Nunn also gives us a glimpse of the Indian community and its place in the hierarchy. Lana, a young woman to whom Cooper is attracted, turns out to be van Niekerk's girlfriend, complicating the nature of all the relationships. When is the murder of three people not about the murder of three people? This is the question that propels the rest of the book, as Cooper struggles to figure out what the real issues are.Ī shadow is cast over whether van Niekerk is really protecting Cooper or whether Cooper is merely a pawn in a larger game.
Of course, there is more than meets the eye. The catch is this: Cooper must find the real murderer within 48 hours or he will be jailed and surely executed.
Van Niekerk has also moved to Durban and, although Cooper is no longer a police officer, hires Cooper to work as an independent investigator on the side. Only the intercession of his mentor and protector, van Niekerk, saves him from immediate arrest. Then Cooper's landlady and her maid are found murdered in a similar fashion. He works in the shipyards as a manual laborer, having been stripped of his badge and his designation as "white," a serious change in circumstance in an extremely stratified, color-coded world in which anything other than white means something less than human.Ĭooper accidentally stumbles across the body of a young white boy, a street hustler from the poor side of town. At the start of Let the Dead Lie, Cooper has moved to Durban from Johannesburg. The time is the early 1950s, soon after apartheid has become the law. He had also sacrificed what other people had, people whom he had come to respect, including a black police constable, Shabalala, and a Jewish refugee doctor, Zweigman. At the end of A Beautiful Place, Cooper had given up everything he had accomplished in order to stand by his principles. Let the Dead Lie gives us the next great chapter in Cooper's roller coaster of a life. It introduced white police detective Emmanuel Cooper.
If you haven't read A Beautiful Place to Die, Malla Nunn's first book in her series set in South Africa, don't read this review.
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