This was an impressive debut book, and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, LET THE DEAD LIE.

Emmanuel Cooper can't be sure that even he is going to get out alive. However the newly passed racial segregation laws are about more than who rules. Cooper will be expected to co-operate.Ī BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO DIE is a fascinating exploration of relationships in an area where white supremacy is already an acknowledged way of life. Things become even more complex when Cooper's boss in Johannesburg tells him that the Security Branch has decided that the murder may be political, and that they are sending a team to take over the investigation. The Pretorius sons think their father has been killed by Mozambique smugglers, but Cooper is not so sure.įinding a doctor who can sign a death certificate leads him to meet 'the Jew', Zweigman, who is an elderly German living with his wife in a shanty town where there are no English or Afrikaners. The opening scene gives Cooper a lesson in how the social structure works around here. At the scene also is the man Pretorius had grown up with, Constable Shabalala, a Zulu. And the investigating 'team' is Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper, sent out solo on the murder of a white police captain.Ĭooper had been investigating another murder only an hour away and had been despatched to check the 'possible' homicide. For the dead man is their father, Captain Willem Pretorius, the local police chief. Three Afrikaner men, built like rugby players, stand a little way off, waiting for the investigating team from Johannesburg to arrive.

Some kaffir boys found the body, and now it is being guarded by a nineteen year old Afrikaner constable. The body floats face down within reach of the river's edge on the South African side. A white man's body has been found in deep country, in the river that separates South Africa from Mozambique. It is against this background that Malla Nunn sets A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO DIE. New legislation classified inhabitants into racial groups ('black', 'white', 'coloured', and 'Indian'), and residential areas were segregated, sometimes by means of forced removals.

Apartheid was a system of legal racial segregation enforced by the National Party government in South Africa between 19, under which the rights of the majority 'non-white' inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and minority rule by white people was maintained.

A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn