Salon.com > Anna Mundow

A sex traffic mystery

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Nobody concludes a novel quite the way Mo Hayder does: with a revelation that leaves the reader staring at the page, poleaxed, willing more words to appear or flicking back to see just how she did it. Hayder's astonishing 2007 horror novel "Pig Island," for example, ended with the stunned narrator, framed for murder, watching his nemesis depart and "something coiled and dark, like smoke or a spirit, lifting itself out of the car and hovering near the roof…" Now, on the final page of "Hanging Hill," a mother lovingly watches her young daughter and a friend drive off to the Glastonbury Festival. "The van turned left. Not right, the way she would have gone…. Leave them alone, she thought…. You just can't go on worrying about your children for ever." Worrying: a quaint, domestic impulse; utterly redundant in the terrifying world that Hayder creates.

South Africa’s dark underbelly exposed

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:20:00 +0000

In his latest thriller, "Trackers," South African novelist Deon Meyer casts a gimlet eye on his native land and fellow countrymen. One narrator, for example, fulminates against "Rich Afrikaaners" who live "... behind high walls and alarm systems ... with a Mercedes ML, two quad bikes, a Harley, and a speedboat squeezed into their triple garages" and who "... bitch about how bad things are in this country." Another contemplates suburbia: "Luxurious cold houses without character ... all these rich white people, but not a book in the house." Meyer's crime fiction has from the outset vividly illuminated life in post-apartheid South Africa. But "Trackers" -- his most ambitious and political novel to date -- exposes not only domestic but also international skulduggery in a plot that weaves together organized crime in South Africa; the smuggling of arms, diamonds and wildlife; the uneasy alliance between South African intelligence and the CIA and -- in a sensational twist -- al-Qaida terrorism.

“Three Stations”: Investigating the dark underbelly of modern Russia

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:20:00 +0000

Almost 30 years ago, in his novel "Gorky Park," Martin Cruz Smith introduced us to Arkady Renko, the Moscow homicide investigator who arrived on the page almost fully alienated -- from his past, from his profession and from the Soviet system. In "Polar Star," the man apart became the man adrift, working on the "slime line" of a Russian factory ship. Each Renko novel seemed to propel its hero further to the margins; the newest, "Three Stations," finds the investigator shocked by his own irrelevance and advancing age. "Who was this graying stranger," Renko wonders, "who rose from his bed, usurped his clothes and occupied his chair at the prosecutor's office?"