Books by Deon Meyer
Deon Meyer is a South African crime novelist whose novels, written in Afrikaans, have become global bestsellers.
“One of his books that is worth mentioning—and was a close runner-up for our list—is Thirteen Hours. It’s a thriller about an American girl who’s been on a trip through Southern Africa and for reasons that are not clear until the end of the book, is being hunted on Table Mountain in Cape Town. The action is between her trying to escape from these killers and the police trying to find out what’s happened to her. That’s a difficult thing to do when you don’t have a motive or much way of tracing where she is. That’s the last book that kept me up until four in the morning because I had to know what happened at the end.” Read more...
Best Southern African Crime Fiction
Michael Stanley, Thriller and Crime Writer
“We felt that his most recent book, The Dark Flood, was a departure from his previous ones in his police procedural series, whose main characters are Benny Griessel and Vaughan Cupido. They’re senior officers in the elite Hawks squad but in this book, they have been demoted because they’ve not obeyed orders that would have caused them to do immoral things. They’re sent off to Stellenbosch, which is a small but attractive wine country town, and there they get involved in a number of different crimes. The most significant one is a big multinational conglomerate, which collapses and takes the local economy with it and the spinoffs from that. It’s actually loosely based on a true story. It has a lot of features which we think would make an excellent introduction to the series. If you read that book, I think you’d want to read more Benny Griessel books.” Read more...
Best Southern African Crime Fiction
Michael Stanley, Thriller and Crime Writer
Interviews where books by Deon Meyer were recommended
Best Southern African Crime Fiction, recommended by Michael Stanley
From high-stakes thrillers to cosy mysteries, from South African township life to Zimbabwe’s independence, Southern African crime fiction is a flourishing genre. Michael Sears, half of the crime-writing duo Michael Stanley, talks us through some of the best Southern African crime books out there and explains how they shed light on important issues.
