Crime Novels Set in Africa

“Gaslight is the second in a series set in Nigeria, featuring an investigative psychologist as the main protagonist…In this novel, Taiwo is asked by his sister to investigate the disappearance of the wife of the pastor of a Christian megachurch. The pastor is charismatic, worth millions, and stands accused of his wife’s murder. Taiwo has moved to Nigeria from the United States with his wife and children, and his experience of that move makes up part of the backdrop to the story. One thing you get an overwhelming sense of in the book: Lagos traffic.” Read more...

The Best Crime Novels of 2023

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“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

“Recently, we’ve been writing prequels to A Carrion Death. The first book, Facets of Death starts when he joins the force as a detective sergeant in the CID. It’s his first big case at the CID. The second book is set in a different part of Botswana. We try to set the books around Botswana, and to have at least a theme which connects with other areas of Botswana, because it’s a very fascinating country in terms of diversity of culture and environment. We’re busy working on the third book at the moment, which links the three prequels with A Carrion Death. So you could start with A Carrion Death, as the first book that introduces Kubu. Or you could start with Facets of Death, which is the day he joins the CID.” Read more...

Best Southern African Crime Fiction

Michael Stanley, Thriller and Crime Writer

“Our first book was called A Carrion Death, and it had the backstory theme of blood diamonds. It introduced Kubu and his family and that would possibly be where people would like to start. The idea for the book came because Stan is a pilot, and we used to do fly-in trips to different areas of Botswana and Zimbabwe. On one occasion, we saw a pack of hyenas attack and pull down a wildebeest. Hyenas are scavengers if there’s one of them, but if there are 50, they’re very successful hunters, which there were in that pack. Over the period of an hour or so, they’d eaten everything. They crunched the bones and ate the skin. There were some horns left and perhaps some bits of hoof, but that was it. We thought that this would make a great way of getting rid of a body in a murder mystery. After all, how can the police trace a murderer if there’s no body—if it’s been processed by hyenas? That’s the premise that starts the book. An ecologist and a game ranger discover a body being eaten by a hyena (the discovery is too soon for the disappearance of the body to actually occur). After we start writing, the question was, ‘Why was it important that this body be completely removed from the world?’ That led to A Carrion Death. Kubu appears fully fleshed out, literally and metaphorically in A Carrion Death and there’s no backstory for him because he wasn’t going to be the main character. We just needed a detective to investigate this murder. But he appeared and took over the series. There are six books in that series.” Read more...

Best Southern African Crime Fiction

Michael Stanley, Thriller and Crime Writer

“It’s called Sleeper and it’s a thriller. It’s about a private investigator whose name is Fish Pescado. He’s a surfer boy in Cape Town, and his partner, Vicki, is an ex-spy with a South African spy authority, the State Security Agency. They make an unlikely but very intriguing combination. We thought this was one of his best, most successful books, balancing the PI and the spy aspects…Nicol picks themes that are high up in the country’s priorities and, at the moment, power generation is a huge one. South Africa has daily scheduled blackouts, and there’s been talk of buying nuclear power stations from the Russians. Control over these things is not as good as it should be, and you do not want enriched uranium to be traded on markets to terrorists. These are real concerns. South Africa has nuclear facilities and it’s a very reasonable question as to whether the control is as good as it should be. That’s what he explores in the book, among other things.” Read more...

Best Southern African Crime Fiction

Michael Stanley, Thriller and Crime Writer

“It’s Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s latest book in her City of Kings trilogy. It’s really lyrical literary fiction as much as it is crime fiction. It’s about a detective whose name is Spokes Moloi. It starts with a fable which is an introduction to the area and his life after he comes back from fighting in the Second World War. I haven’t spoken to Ndlovu yet, but I’m going to be doing an interview with her. For reasons I’m not 100 percent sure about yet, she sets her books in a fictional African country. But all the aspects of it are Zimbabwe, which is her home country. The Quality of Mercy is set at the time of the changeover between Rhodesia into Zimbabwe and all the tensions and frictions that produced. Again, we thought it was a bit of a landmark, in terms of taking the Southern African political scene and showing how it affects real people, from the inside. She’s a Zimbabwean writer and she knows what she’s talking about.” Read more...

Best Southern African Crime Fiction

Michael Stanley, Thriller and Crime Writer

“This was the first book that looked at township life in South Africa from a novelist’s point of view. Mzobi knows it really well. This was a landmark in South African crime fiction because it switched from the police procedural thriller trope to a novel based on a coming of age in the townships where the only way of making it, in any sense, is through crime. This is not such a recent book (we tried to focus on more recent books) but it’s still as relevant today as it was when he wrote it. It won the Sunday Times literary prize in 2011 as well as the 2012 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. It’s now been published by Catalyst Press, so it’s available internationally.” 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

“This is set in South Africa, in the Klein Karoo, which is a rural area in the semi-arid part of the country. It’s just delightful. It’s an intriguing murder investigation with wonderful small-town characters. The heroine, Tannie Maria, is a superb cook. She loves to prepare and create recipes. She writes a recipe column for the local newspaper, the Klein Karoo Gazette, and then she gets pushed into writing a lonely hearts column as well. The two are combined: she solves the lonely hearts problems with recipes which she suggests that the romantic parties should try on each other to improve their relationship. It’s very enjoyable. I suppose you would call it cosy, though the murders can be quite dark. In the times that Maria is investigating the murders, she runs afoul of the police by interfering with what they’re trying to do, but she develops a romantic relationship with one of them. The Tannie Maria series has been very successful worldwide, and there’s a TV series of the book as well. We chose the first book in the series, Recipes for Love and Murder, because it’s the right place to start, in terms of introducing the characters.” Read more...

Best Southern African Crime Fiction

Michael Stanley, Thriller and Crime Writer