New Crime Fiction from Umuzi: Those Who Love Night by Wessel Ebersohn

by Amanda on Aug 16th, 2010

Those Who Love Night is a riveting political thriller, which sees the return of Abigail Bukula, the brilliant young lawyer who teamed up with Yudel Gordon, veteran criminologist of Ebersohn’s oeuvre in The October Killings (2009).

When ten activists go missing in Zimbabwe, Abigail’s help is sought. Among the missing ten, believed to be held at the notorious Chikurubi prison, is Abigail’s cousin – a gifted writer and the child of an aunt who died in the Gukuruhandi massacres of the early 1980s. Reading her cousin’s work and trying to understand him, Abigail turns to Yudel, whom she hasn’t seen in four years.

Yudel follows Abigail to Zimbabwe where she wins the court battle for their release, but at Chikurubi there is no trace of the ten prisoners. In the days to follow, Abigail and Yudel search for the missing activists in a race against time. They uncover a relationship that no one could have anticipated in the complex power web in a country struggling to throw off the dictatorship of the past, and where success and tragedy are like Siamese twins.

From Those Who Love Night

She had heard the sound made by engines for at least five minutes now. By her reckoning, they should already have arrived in the village.

On most evenings, especially on Fridays, someone would arrive from Bulawayo or Plumtree, and you could hear their approach from the time they came round the low hill on the far side of the open stretch of savannah where the cattle grazed. The sound would start as a soft humming, then gradually grow louder. It would be perhaps two or three minutes before the vehicle arrived in the village.

Tonight was different. The sound was clearly that of more than one vehicle, and she had been hearing it for longer than she would have expected on other nights. It also had a deeper note. She knew the sound made by diesel engines and thought that must be the reason for the sound’s rumbling nature. It was much louder than that made by just a single car or even a truck.

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About the author

Wessel Ebersohn lives in Johannesburg. Most of his nine books have been international successes.

They include A Lonely Place to Die, Divide the Night, Store up the Anger and Closed Circle.

He stopped writing fiction to create,Succeed, a magazine for entrepreneurs, with his wife Miriam. The October Killings (Umuzi, 2009) was his first new novel to appear in more than 14 years. For this title he has been offered a publising contract in the US.

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