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A Beautiful Place To Die
Malla Nunn
Atria
January 2009
On Sale: January 6, 2009
384 pages ISBN: 1416586202 EAN: 9781416586203 Hardcover
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Historical
Award-winning screenwriter Malla Nunn delivers a stunning
and darkly romantic crime novel set in 1950s apartheid
South Africa, featuring Detective Emmanuel Cooper -- a man
caught up in a time and place where racial tensions and the
raw hunger for power make life very dangerous indeed.
In a morally complex tale rich with authenticity, Nunn
takes readers to Jacob's Rest, a tiny town on the border
between South Africa and Mozambique. It is 1952, and new
apartheid laws have recently gone into effect, dividing a
nation into black and white while supposedly healing the
political rifts between the Afrikaners and the English.
Tensions simmer as the fault line between the oppressed and
the oppressors cuts deeper, but it's not until an Afrikaner
police officer is found dead that emotions more dangerous
than anyone thought possible boil to the surface. When Detective Emmanuel Cooper, an Englishman, begins
investigating the murder, his mission is preempted by the
powerful police Security Branch, who are dedicated to their
campaign to flush out black communist radicals. But
Detective Cooper isn't interested in political expediency
and has never been one for making friends. He may be
modest, but he radiates intelligence and certainly won't be
getting on his knees before those in power. Instead, he
strikes out on his own, following a trail of clues that
lead him to uncover a shocking forbidden love and the
imperfect life of Captain Pretorius, a man whose
relationships with the black and coloured residents of the
town he ruled were more complicated and more human than
anyone could have imagined. The first in her Detective Emmanuel Cooper series, A
Beautiful Place to Die marks the debut of a talented writer
who reads like a brilliant combination of Raymond Chandler
and Graham Greene. It is a tale of murder, passion,
corruption, and the corrosive double standard that defined
an apartheid nation.
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