TOUR DE FORCE IN CRIME-WRITING PENS TWO NEW PAGE-TURNERS
CIRCUS IRMA VENTER Human & Rousseau
BLUE SUNDAY
IRMA VENTER Human & Rousseau Reviews: Alan Peter Simmonds
TWO novels from the prolific pen of Afrikaans author Irma Venter are worth much more than a glance. They are slick, contemporary, chilling and quintessentially South African.
Top South African author Deon Meyer has been quoted as calling her work world class.
Enjoying success with the previous “S” series crime novels – Skoenlapper, Skrapnel, Sondebok and Skarlaken, Sirkus (translated as Circus) and Sondag (as Blue Sunday) each make excellent reading.
In Circus (Human & Rousseau), Adriana van der Hoon, 18, a teenager growing up in apartheid-era 1980s Johannesburg is blackmailed by the notorious security police to bring down her own father.
Known as the Dutchman, he is a donor currency smuggler for the ANC until shot dead during a bogus heist, and now his daughter enters the “big top”.
Her relentless security police handler makes her assume her father’s role at the bogus non-profit Education Trust and track down the money’s source.
Full of angst, but unafraid to make quick decisions, she travels under an alias to a still-divided Berlin.
There she obtains employment, of all things, as a knife-thrower in a seedy club.
To learn more she has an affair with the club’s even seedier owner and the
money trail becomes clearer when he supplies her with cash to take back to South Africa to the ANC.
Nevertheless, when the young woman realises her lover and cash supplier is worse than she thought, including being a cold-hearted killer; she has second thoughts.
In her English series (Circus translated by Elsa Silke; Blue Sunday by former colleague Karin Schimke), each will be named after a well-known hit (Circus by Britney Spears; Blue Sunday by The Doors), so one can read and listen to the appropriate background entertainment.
Blue Sunday opens with a scenario set on Christmas Eve where there has been a break-in at the Stables Estate in Pretoria east.
A wealthy entrepreneur Lafras van Zyl is left for dead; his entire family is missing without trace.
Are they dead, kidnapped, or have they just left?
Six weeks pass without a peep; no clues to their whereabouts surface and so the big brains are called in.
Captain AJ Williams is appointed to try to solve the mystery. Simultaneously Alex Derksen and Ranna Abramson are trying to track down a teenager Martina Buitendag, missing from Yeoville.
As in any good crime whodunnit there are many twists and turns, many deceptions, seemingly no answers. In doubt to the denouement.
Neither should be missed; well done to author and translators.
Irma Venter as a journalist in Johannesburg, received several accolades, including the Siemens Africa Profile Award for Science and Technology writing in 2012. She received the ATKV award for a suspense novel, for her debut, Skoenlapper.