Blessed Are the Dead
An Emmanuel Cooper Mystery
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5.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper returns in this powerful, atmospheric novel about two communities forced to confront each other after a murder that exposes their secret ties and forbidden desires in apartheid South Africa, by award-winning author Malla Nunn.
The body of a beautiful seventeen-year-old Zulu girl, Amahle, is found covered in wildflowers on a hillside in the Drakensberg Mountains, halfway between her father’s compound and the enormous white-owned farm where she worked. Detective Sergeant Cooper and Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala are sent to the desolate landscape to investigate. They soon discover that Amahle’s life was woven into both the black and white communities in ways they could never have imagined. Cooper and Shabalala must enter the guarded worlds of a traditional Zulu clan and a divided white farming community to gather up the secrets she left behind and bring her murderer to justice.
In a country deeply divided by apartheid, where the law is bent as often as it is broken, Emmanuel Cooper fights against all odds to deliver justice and bring together two seemingly disparate and irreconcilable worlds despite the danger that is arising.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nunn once again vividly recaptures 1950s South Africa in her gripping and thoughtful third mystery featuring Det. Sgt. Emmanuel Cooper (after 2010's Let the Dead Lie). When Amahle Matebula, a 17-year-old Zulu girl and a chief's daughter, is murdered in a farming hamlet outside Durban, Cooper, who's of mixed race, and his assistant, Det. Constable Samuel Shabalala, of the Native Detective Branch, investigate. The father of the girl, who was promised in marriage to another chief in exchange for 20 cows, appears most concerned that he won't receive the livestock. Matebula's disappearance a few days earlier was reported to the local authorities, who did nothing. The corpse, which was laid out carefully with a blanket for a pillow, shows no sign of injury apart from a small bruise. Oddly, the local doctor is reluctant to help with a forensic examination. The anomalies all come together nicely by the end as Nunn brilliantly combines character and fair play clues.
