Those Who Love Night

November 7, 2011
In Ebersohn’s pulse-pounding second crime novel starring South African public prosecutor Abigail Bukula (after 2011’s The October Killings), Abigail travels to neighboring Zimbabwe to represent seven political prisoners arrested by the repressive government, one of whom is a male cousin she’d never heard of before. The authorities, in no hurry to grant her a date in court, refuse to even confirm that the inmates are in their custody. A tragic shooting, which makes clear that her own safety is far from guaranteed, ups the ante. Evidence that Abigail’s beloved husband may have a wandering eye complicates her relationship with Jonas Chunga, a high-level official in the Central Intelligence Organization, Zimbabwe’s secret police. Yudel Gordon, a prison psychologist who shares her commitment to justice, again lends his support. Ebersohn clearly conveys the uncertainties of life under Mugabe’s capricious dictatorship while also illuminating the complex inner life of his flawed but admirable protagonist.

January 1, 2012
Furloughed from her job with South Africa's Department of Justice, attorney Abigail Bukula is free to go to Zimbabwe for some pro bono work that pays only in adventure, danger and unwelcome romance. Even though attorney Krisj Patel insists that Tony Makumbe, the headline dissident of the Harare Seven, is actually the cousin Abigail never knew she had, she turns down Patel's request that she come to Zimbabwe to help him win the release of Tony and the other six. But when she pushes back against the decision to dissolve the Directorate of Special Operations, where she's worked very effectively under advocate Gert Pienaar, Abigail's offered a promotion to the newly formed Directorate of Priority Crimes on the condition that she take a six-month sabbatical leave starting instantly. Since she's just been tipped off that her wealthy husband, Robert Mokoapi, is cheating on her with his nubile temp, it suddenly seems like a perfect time to leave him behind and go to Zimbabwe, where she's soon joined by her old friend, Yudel Gordon, who's also enjoying some time off from his job at C-Max prison. The road to freeing the Seven, Patel informs her, runs through the good offices of Director Jonas Chunga, of the Central Intelligence Organization. Abigail's not optimistic about dealing with such a powerful man, but Chunga isn't what she expected. Obviously swept off his feet by her, he presses her for all sorts of intimacies that leave her wondering where her loyalties lie. When Patel is assassinated, however, Chunga, whose motives are anything but straightforward, becomes her only hope. Looser and more engaging than Abigail's debut (The October Killings, 2011, etc.), but just as committed in its anatomy of the unending legacy of apartheid.

(COPYRIGHT (2012) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 1, 2012

Fifteen years ago, Abigail Bukula, now a rising lawyer in the Department of Justice in postapartheid South Africa, practiced in neighboring Zimbabwe. After a Zimbabwean lawyer informs Abigail that the son of her late aunt is now imprisoned with six other dissidents, the lawyer is brutally assassinated. Abigail goes to investigate, and as she struggles to assert the law in a country where the government shows little concern for justice, she finds herself attracted to the mysterious assistant head of the Central Intelligence Organization. Her prison psychologist friend, Yudel Gordon, joins Abigail in her quest to free her nephew. VERDICT Abigail and Yudel, who first joined forces in Ebersohn's The October Killings, are an odd couple: she a young black woman, he an elderly Jewish man. Abigail's striking resemblance to her aunt, killed in a massacre two decades earlier, is key to a dramatic climax that brings into stark relief the turmoil of a ravaged country whose terrible history influences present events. This is another fine effort by a skilled writer and sympathetic observer of his native land. Fans of other South African crime writers like Roger Smith and Deon Meyer will appreciate.--Roland Person, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2012
Abigail Bukula, introduced in The October Killings (2011), returns in this intense story that reaches back into Zimbabwe's violent past. An accomplished lawyer and rising star in the South African Justice Department, Abigail is shocked to learn that she has a cousin, Tony, whom she never knew existed and that he has been imprisoned in Zimbabwe as part of the activist Harare Seven. With the aid of an idealistic lawyer, she determines the best course of action to procure the young activists' release from one of the government's most notorious prisons, but government and prison officials claim they are not even holding the group. She is joined in her efforts by brilliant prison psychologist Yudel Gordon and seems to have gained the favor of one of the secret police's high-level bureaucrats, Jonas Chunga. But what does Chunga really want from her, and why is she so willing to put her marriage vows aside? Like fellow South African Deon Meyer, Ebersohn excels at depicting the treacherous politics of an unstable country, one in which the search for justice is always fraught.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)