The Dark Flood

"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. Yes, he’s a recovering alcoholic. In almost every book, I think, he’s either on the verge of drinking again, or does start drinking again and has to drag himself back. In the last few books, he’s developed a romantic relationship with another recovering alcoholic and the two of them help each other. Vaughan Cupido is a detective of mixed race. The two of them form a team. They’ve got different philosophies and different interests. But as in so many police procedurals, when you have a team like that, you get an interesting interplay between the detectives. As I mentioned, they end up in the elite Hawks squad, which deals with the most serious and most challenging crimes. The previous books in the series have been police procedurals involving different types of cases. 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. We chose the Stellenbosch one because it was a bit different. A lot of the action follows Sandra Steenberg, an estate agent who is trying to sell a property in Stellenbosch that a tycoon is now selling because his business has collapsed. Of course it’s not a clean sale. The farm is not in his name and Steenberg gets dragged into an international intrigue. The police are also trying to find a kidnapped student because Stellenbosch is a university town. So there are these different themes in the book. It’s a wine farm that Steenberg is trying to sell. Owning a fancy wine farm in a good area of the Cape has become a trophy for big businessmen. When you’ve made it, you buy a wine farm in the Cape, and you become a wine farmer. You have your private reserve, and you’ll probably lose lots of money on it, but you don’t care."