"Jacob's Rest is a tiny town on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. It is 1952, and new apartheid laws have recently gone into effect. When an Afrikaner police officer is murdered, the powerful police Security Branch, dedicated to flushing out black communist radicals, preempts Detective Emmanuel Cooper's investigation. But Cooper isn't interested in political expediency and has never been one for making friends. Instead, he strikes out...

They find her decomposing body in the veld. A teenager. She was raped and tortured for days. She was hanged. She wasn't the first. The South African Police Service's Warrant Officer Jan Magson, estranged from his son and still grieving for his wife, is assigned to the case. He has to look the mothers and fathers in the eye. He has to answer their questions. And he can't. Headlines question the police's ability to protect the community from this evil....

"The body of a young woman is found drifting in a river, and Detective Eberard Februarie is called in to investigate the case. A man struggling with his own demons, Eberard discovers secrets that lead him to an underworld of sexual hedonism, to the rotten core of this old university town"--

Lieutenant Kramer and Sergeant Zondi face two very different crimes, the death of a candy shop owner in a bothced robbery and the death of an adult entertainer, strangled to death in her dressing room, with her pet python wrapped around her neck.