Exhibit A by Sarah Lotz

Rape. An ugly word. A heinous act. Is justice possible if the rapist is someone whose job it is to provide protection, a police officer? Sarah Lotz's first legal drama explores this question.

George Allen is a Cape Town lawyer. He can't afford a pro bono case but when a woman he met in a bar (and whom he'd like to know better) asks him to help her sister who says she was raped in a police cell by a policeman, he agrees to investigate. George heads off to Barryville, a small town in the Klein Karoo. Backing him up is Patrick McLennan, known to the entire legal community (and his wife) as the Poison Dwarf, 'one of the most feared advocates in Cape Town' who makes up for his short stature by being a 'total and utter bastard'. In the backseat is Exhibit A, a scruffy dog Patrick claims is a witness to a crime. The many irregularities they find resolve George and Patrick to pursue the case all the way to the courtroom.

Aside: The South African legal system is modeled after the British. George is an attorney. He meets with clients and handles their legal needs like contracts, divorces, etc. If the case goes to court, the attorney briefs an advocate who is an expert in arguing cases in front of a judge.

Exhibit A is based on an actual event and dramatizes the serious problem of rape in South Africa. The country is reported to lead the world in rape cases and a 2010 study reveals that a quarter of the males in South Africa have admitted to committing a rape. And those are just the known cases. Searching South African news also shows that rape by police officers is disturbingly common. Some readers might prefer a little more distance between their fiction and reality but I think the author's decision to solidly anchor the story in a national crises makes it a stronger.

Lotz has a deft touch creating her characters who are among my favorites in crime fiction. She also finds a way to include dark, ironic, sarcastic humour to offset a grim topic.  Patrick is often the focus in humorous situations being short, Scottish, and constantly eating, but his excellence as an advocate is never questioned. Likewise, George, a little down at the heels, practice eking along, and whose love life is a shambles after breaking up with fellow attorney, Val (aka The Witch), has wry observations about himself but still comes across as a lawyer I would engage. Val is George's ex domestic and law partner. She doesn't get as much page time but when she does, it is a treat. She is the target of some of Patrick's best caustic comments. If the author asked me what I wold like to see next in this series, I would ask for a story from before Val and George broke up.

In addition to a good story and characters, the author gives you a good sense of place. You know you are in South Africa. I enjoyed the way she described Barryville in the Klein (Little) Karoo. She lets you feel that you are in one of those 'tiny South African towns that stuck in a time warp and is dripping with small-town prejudice and incipient racist values'. If you enjoy books set in a different country that gives you a feeling for the location then I predict you will enjoy Exhibit A.

Sarah has a second book featuring these characters, Tooth and Nailed. Both are available in Kindle editions here: Exhibit A, Tooth and Nailed. Buy both and maybe she will be encouraged to write a third.

Deadlands by Lily Herne

Lele de la Fontein has problems not all that different from many 17-year-olds: prone to whinging; stubborn; convinced her step-mother hates her; resentful that she's been taken from a warm agricultural community where she and her brother lived with their grandmother until she died to the smelly, dirty, and hostile city; out of place in her new school where the in-crowd students mock her as Farm Girl; and attracted to the bad boy in her class. But most teenagers don't live in a world where the dead rise and what remains of humanity has been forced into fenced enclaves.

This is the Cape Town city enclave, ten years after the dead reanimated and the living fought a savage war of survival, one that would have been lost if not for the arrival of the mysterious Guardians. Daily existence is mostly pre-industrial. The Guardians can control the reanimated, the Rotters, and established the enclaves but no one knows anything about them, where they came from, what they look like under their hooded robes. They rule the Deadlands, the area outside the enclaves. Within the city, a fanatical religious cult has taken over. The Resurrectionists worship the Guardians as saviors and see the Reanimates as the next step for humanity, as one of the ReBorn. In response to her teacher telling her that things are much better now, Lele thinks to herself:

Sure. Trapped in a muddy, stinking prison, surrounded by a sea of dead people and ruled by a bunch of hysterical nutters, that's so much better than before. Not.

This is Lele's world and it is treacherous. Her parents are trying to steer her into a career path but if she is too rebellious she might find herself forced into marriage and required to produce as many children as possible. Under the influence of bad boy Thabo, Lele gets involved in the anti-Resurrectionist, anti-zombie movement, the ANZ. Through Thabo, Lele learns about the Mall Rats, and underground organization able to supply pre-war goods.

Looming over the life of all teenagers is the Lottery, an event demanded by the Guardians in return for reintroducing technology. At the Lottery Dance, teenagers are selected to be taken by the Guardians. This is considered an honor though no one knows what happens to those chosen. Lele is supposed to be exempt from the Lottery because her brother Jobe had been taken by the Guardians at the beginning of the War and returned. Unfortunately for Lele, she has been noticed and she finds herself "chosen" and in the back of a wagon driven by Guardians with four other teenagers hurtling toward an unknown fate.

Deadlands is the first book in a young adult series by the mother and daughter team of Sarah and Savannah Lotz writing as Lily Herne. South African author Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City and Moxyland said that...

Deadlands is cool, provocacative and sharp as spiny teeth. A viciously satirical, pop-culture loaded, teen zombie apocalypse with heart – it's smart, dark, sweet, gruesome, political and, best of all, funny.

Lauren sums up everything I like about this book.

Before I go any further, let me address one issue. There is a lottery in Deadlands in which teenagers are chosen. Someone is going to say that since there is a lottery it must be derived from The Hunger Games. No. Lotteries are hardly new to literature (Shirley Jackson, anyone) and this lottery only gets four pages. The implications of the Deadlands Lottery are huge for this post-apocalyptic society but it is given only a brief treatment to get things rolling.

You can read Deadlands as "teenagers fighting the establishment" and it works well there. The writing is sharp, no superflous exposition, you get to the heart of the story quickly. Important questions are answered so the reader isn't left with a "gerrr, what the hell is going on and why do I have to wait until the next book for answers" feeling. I'm a sucker for this sort of story having grown up on Robert Heinlein's juvi novels. But, as Lauren points out above, there are satirical elements to the story.

In personal correspondence and social media I've noticed that events in the US are carefully watched by the world. What happens here can have far ranging effects. In many cases, observers from other countries are more aware of what's going on in the US than many of its own citizens. I suspect that the Resurrectionist cult is based on the religious extremism that is asserting itself in this country where we have fanatical true believers prone to rewriting history some of whom call for the death of non-believers, corrupt individuals exploiting that fanaticism for their own ends, and people who wear the outward trappings without the fanatical adherence because it is easier not to get noticed.

The authors take a poke, sometimes humorous, at consumerism and popular culture. Sarah seems to have something against malls.

Below I explain several references found in the story which might not be obvious to non-South Africans. There might be a spoiler depending on the level of detail you are willing to accept before reading a book so be warned.

Unless you live in South Africa or know someone planing to visit South Africa (which is how I got my copy), you won't be able to read Deadlands now. It is available for pre-order from Amazon UK and will be available 18 April 2013. Here is the link.

Deadlands takes place around the year 2020. The war has been over for 10 years. When dead reanimated there were visitors in the country for the soccer World Cup which took place in 2010.

The new history textbook given to Lele's class references an iconic photograph from the 1976 Soweto Uprising. A dying Hector Peterson (Pieterson), shot by police, is shown in the arms of a classmate. The Resurrectionists use this to how how bad things were in the past in contrast with the security people now enjoy.

The Cape Town city enclosure was constructed around what is now the Khayelitsha township in Cape Flats. It is about 20 miles outside of Cape Town proper. Cape Town was destroyed in a great fire during the war against the reanimates. I wonder if it is irony on the part of the authors to move the survivors to a fenced enclosure in Cape Flats which has been described as apartheid's dumping ground.

The Resurrectionists use gangster and slasher films to show the people how bad things were in the old days. Lele and her family go to see Jerusalema. This is an actual film and now has the title Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema. It is a 2008 production and quite good. I watched it on Netflix and ordered it on DVD immediately after it ended. I'll review it later.

You will read references to a panga. The Panga is a machete and shows up in many South African crime stories.

You can order one from The Knife Center. I'm planning to get one for my zombie contingency kit. I already have a cricket bat.

Ratanga Junction is mentioned in the story. This a theme park and part of Century City. A super-regional mall is nearby.

The Ward by SL Grey

It is both the beauty and curse of the horror genre that it can take so many forms. Shirley Jackson's The Lottery is horror and taught (in my day) in high school English classes. It also might be my first twist ending. Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is the ghost story kind of horror. Literary horror, but horror nonetheless. It also gave us the "creepy kid"* theme which has become a horror trope. At the other end of the horror spectrum is a book I recently reviewed, Roger Smith's (writing as Max Wilde) Vile Blood, an exploration of evil and heavy on gore.

I'm going to use the terms upside and downside in this review. Upside is our world. Downside is the shadow world.

The Ward follows the authors' first book, The Mall (review here). The Ward is set in a poor public hospital in Johannesburg and not long after the events of The Mall. There are several small crossovers between the two books and I recommend  reading The Mall first. It takes place in that ubiquitous temple of communal worship dedicated to all things commercial, the urban mall. What they do with it is both humorous and horrifying.

The story is told from alternating first person, male and a female viewpoints. Josh Farrell is a pretentious, self-absorbed fashion photographer. Lisa Cassavetes suffers from a severe case of body dysmorphic disorder.

Josh returns to consciousness after two days, blind, in New Hope hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. He learns that he collapsed at work with a severe case of measles. Almost a greater shock than his medical condition is where he is. His medical aid should have him in a first rate hospital, not No Hope as it is popularly called. Lisa is on the same ward. Unable to get any more plastic surgery in Durban, Lisa has conned her way into New Hope in her search for physical perfection. Both are in New Hope for reasons out of their control and when they find themselves in the downside Wards, the horror begins.

The first third takes place in New Hope/No Hope hospital and it paints a grim picture of public healthcare. Lack of cleanliness, bad attitudes, and scarcity of health-care staff have figured into reports on the state of public hospitals in South Africa this year. It is no wonder that the authors have Josh horrified to learn that he is in a public hospital instead of  the private facilities his medical aide should be paying for. The downside wards demonstrate a different view of health care. Let's just say that it's commodity based.

With The Mall and now The Ward, S.L. Grey (Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg) are exploring a form of horror somewhere between Jackson/James and Smith mentioned above. Because I'm a librarian and think in categories, I decided the books dealt with horror of the variety perversion of the familiar or the perversion of safe places.

I asked the authors how they see their books. Sarah said she would "nick China Miéville's term 'weird fiction'** as a category for the Downside books, as I'm not sure they fit fit under the 'horror' umbrella completely or what the term really means any more." 'Weird fiction' is a good description for their books. Wikipedia has an article on it, naturally. If you do a search on china mieville weird fiction I think you'll agree with Sarah.

Louis confirmed that I was on the right track:

We did deliberately set out to take everyday (and often boring, mundane) reality like shopping malls and add a frightening twist to it...If something looks just about real, but there's just something off about it, we both think that's more frightening than something completely fantastic....We wanted to put real, everyday people in weird situations and really try to ge our reders to imagine how they'd react if that implausible stuff were really happening to them.

 The Mall and The Ward are set in places that represent pleasure, comfort, and safety, and use those locations also to examine political and social issues while at the same time giving the reader a cracking good read and scare. The Mall It takes place in that ubiquitous temple of communal worship dedicated to all things commercial, the urban mall. What they do with it is both humorous and horrifying.  The Ward focuses on health care, with disparity in care as a subtext and does it in a darker and, I think, more cynical way. Louis said that they "deliberately set out to satirise certain injustices that are ripe for satirising in society. They seemed a good background for our novels, but it's the characters and situations that are in the foreground. The books are primarily for fun.""

The Ward advances our knowledge of the downside world and we see more of the Administration, those who run downside. I think the authors had a bit of fun creating a new bizarro-world bureaucracy. We also learn that downside interacts with the upside more than we expected from events in The Mall.

The Ward and The Mall are a fun, intelligent, read with a good blend of character, setting, humour, satire, and social commentary. They have a flavour of South Africa which adds a little spice for non-South Africans and probably gives the South African readers an "oh yea, I've been there" feeling. I love the "secret world" trope and the Downside series is one of the best. The third volume is in the works and I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing what aspect of Downside will be explored next.

As of this review you will have to purchase a copy of The Ward from Amazon UK. If you live in the UK you can get it also through Book Depository which will not ship it to the US at this time.

*I borrowed this from shmoop.com. They have a nice 4 paragraph "in a nutshell" essay on The Turn of the Screw.

**Wikipedia article on weird fiction.

Jack Hanger by James Fouché

Jack Hanger tells the story of six days in the life of Dave Matters set against the backdrop of the 2010 World Cup Soccer tournament in South Africa.

Dave is ex-muscle for a gangster, an ex-con, and former undercover operative for the police, all by the age of 27. During a high speed chase through Cape Town's busiest streets after a drug dealer who might lead him the elusive drug lord known as Joe Taxi, Dave crashes and suffers a serious head injury. He was never "right" after the accident and is now content to clerk in a video rental store.

When his little brother Joshua gets in over his head with the mob and murdered, Dave is compelled to take them down. It isn't just revenge, Dave says but "It's about dirt that needs to surface." His police detective friend Marsh won't sanction him going undercover again but is resigned that Dave won't let it drop and hopes that he doesn't do anything too stupid and will call him if he does.

Jack Hanger is a basic "one man seeking revenge against a criminal organization" story that we've read before but don't think that puts it into the tired cliche school of crime fiction. It is a solid story, compact, with a short time frame that pushes the story along, and a main character different from any I've encountered before. The Cape Town setting adds an interesting atmosphere to the action.

The main strength of the story, for me, is the character of Dave Matters. He has a form of obsessive compulsive disorder that compels him to keep both hands busy, often on different tasks, and his mind thinking of two or three things at the same time. The accident also left him not always able to link emotions, actions, thoughts, and senses. "He can't connect all the dots properly, so...he just doesn't connect them at all." He can be a teddy bear or a wrecking machine without comprehending what he is feeling or why. Fouché integrates Dave's neurological condition into the action and it adds layers of complexity to an otherwise straight forward story of a man seeking his brother's killers. He is a man who wants to find meaning in life but finds life confusing. I found Dave someone I'd like to know, likable and scary at the same time and this makes the relationship between Dave and the police detective Marsh more believable. If I can believe in Dave then so can Marsh.

This is the author's first book. He does have some odd word choices and phrasing that initially made me pause but I found a rhythm to the flow of words and decided that I was experiencing the world as Dave might.

Fouché is currently working on a white collar crime story.

Jack Hanger is available in paperback from Amazon

A Jack Hanger is also known as a butcher bird and is noted for hanging its food on barbed wire or  twigs and thorns.

Vile Blood by Max Wilde (aka Roger Smith)

Horror, red in tooth and claw. If this is how you like it then Vile Blood is the book for you.

Roger Smith's books all have a tinge of horror. Gatsby (Mixed Blood), Piper (Wake Up Dead), Inja (Dust Devils), Vernon Saul (Capture), all broken away from humanity, bringing fear and pain to anyone unfortunate to cross them. You look into their eyes and see a soulless void.

With Vile Blood, Roger moves into a different form of horror. Here "tooth and claw" is not a metaphor but actual limb rending, disemboweling horror. The easy way out with this sort of horror is to shock the reader as often as possible with gratuitous, grotesque violence. But Roger applies the same careful character building and plot development that you find in his South African crime thrillers.

Vile Blood takes place in an unspecified part of the American Southwest, a departure from the South African settings of Roger's previous books. This isn't the wide-open spaces, buffalo roaming, picture postcard west. It is poisoned earth, dead or dying towns, corruption. And a good man trying to stand against evil finding his principles tested.

Four soldiers of a drug lord are killed in savage, bloody, and gruesome ways, like a wild beast tore them apart. For Chief Deputy Sheriff Gene Martindale, the crime scene brings back memories he hoped would stay hidden. Has the beast that lies within his adopted sister Skye awakened? Gene protected his sister all those years ago but now Dellbert Drum, corrupt sheriff from the neighboring county, remembering what happened to Gene and Skye back then, pockets evidence at the crime scene. He sees a way to make Gene an accessory in his drug distribution network.

At the same time the beast is awakening in Skye, so does Junior Cotton from his coma in a mental hospital. Junior is pure, spawn of Satan evil, and has a primal, psychic connection to Gene and Skye that makes it inevitable that their lives will intersect.

Rounding out the cast of principle characters is the Reverend Jimmy Tincup, depraved, debased, and degenerate, running a meth lab in an abandoned motel with his whores. Tincup supplies the product for Drum's drug enterprise.

The horror elements are well done and well placed, contributing to the story without becoming repetitive. Roger also answers a question I hadn't considered before: what happens the morning after the beast feeds. Though this is is the first in a series, the reader isn't left hanging. We get enough satisfying details on Skye's background to get our interest but the complete picture will be developed in the sequels.

As with Smith's other books, he gives the reader a good foundation with the story but he also populates the story with memorable characters: the stolid Gene Martindale who you can see meeting the bad guy at noon on a dusty street in the old west; the virginal Skye Martindale trying to come to terms with what is happening to her; the outwardly genial, inwardly putrid Dellbert Drum; the evil psychopath Junior Cotton whose early life is as much horror as the scene that opens the book; and the Rev. Tincup as venal and unredeemable a character as has ever populated a story.

Roger has a background in film and one of his strengths is to give the reader graphic detail with which to build a mental image of the people, setting and action. For me, the stand-out is the Rev. Tincup and his decaying motel fiefdom. Fascinating and at the same time repellent, like an accident you can't look away from.

There will be sequels to Vile Blood and this is not the case where I am curious what happens next, I NEED to know what happens next to these people.

Vile Blood is available from Amazon for the Kindle.