Review by Booklist Review
Jeffrey Mullet Mendes and Vincent Saldana, once Cape Town cops, have left the force to become private investigators. Mullet takes their first case tailing an adulterous financial consultant because Saldana is on an extended bender. Once sober, Saldana is hired to stake out an abalone farm whose owners believe it will soon be robbed. In time, the cases converge around Jim Woo, a Harvard Business School alum and member of a devious and dangerous Taiwanese Triad. Asians believe abalone is an aphrodisiac, and because abalone prices have skyrocketed, poaching the fish has become more lucrative than drug dealing. Gun battles erupt between fishing boats, with the police are outnumbered and outgunned. The plot is a mash-up, but the essence of this engaging series debut is its setting, volatile Cape Town. Sam Cole (a pseudonym for South African writers Mike Nicol and Joanne Hichens) throws plausible observations about life in Cape Town, South African slang, and more at the reader in bunches, and the pace seems to reflect life in the chaotic city. An edgy eye-opener.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
One major crime dovetails violently into another in this accomplished page-turner set in exotic Cape Town, South Africa, though ex-cops-turned-PIs Jeffrey "Mullet" Mendes and Vincent Saldana hoped to concentrate strictly on the "no-gun stuff." The two-man agency has been open only four months, with Vincent spending the time drunk and Mullet making ends meet by selling dope on the side. Suddenly, two cases come across the transom, a shadow job on a cheating husband and-score points for originality-high-ticket theft from local abalone farms. And related to those are urban hunting parties and the bodies of the street kids found ritualistically buried in the oceanside dunes. The novel features great villains in Jim Woo, trying to con his triad brothers, and Arno Loots, who laughs "as if someone had told him about laughter but he'd never actually heard it." Cole-the pseudonym for Mike Nicol (The Ibis Tapestry) and Joanne Hitchens-keeps the prose clipped, the action fast. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The beautiful South African city of Cape Town, the abalone industry, and a hard-boiled PI tale meld into a suspenseful first outing. Ex-cops Mullet Mendes and Vincent Saldana find themselves caught in a web of danger, where they do not know the rules of the game or even what game is being played. Saldana is getting the goods on a woman's supposedly adulterous husband, and Mendes pursues criminals raiding an abalone farm. Things get personal when one of the thieves recognizes Saldana, but the two are clueless until the book's final heart-stopping pages. VERDICT Cole, the pseudonym for South African novelist Mike Nicol (Horseman) and Joanne Hichens, combines the street smarts of Elmore Leonard with Michael Stanley's and Deon Meyer's gritty depictions of South Africa's criminal culture. Readers who like their crime fiction set in exotic locations will want to try this excellent debut. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Beneath the tough-guy pseudonym, first-timer Joanna Hichens and veteran fabulist Mike Nicol (The Ibis Tapestry, 1998, etc.) team up for a sizzling slice of South African noir. Two phone calls seconds apart engage both partners in Mendes Saldana. Marina Welsh, recently widowed by a carjacker, wants Vincent Saldana, a former member of Cape Town's Anti-Poaching Unit, to track down whoever robbed the abalone farm she shares with her brother David and shady Jim Woo. Judith Oxford's job for ex-cop Jeffrey Mendes, aka Mullet, seems more prosaic: to get evidence that her husband Roger, an investment advisor whose business is more lucrative than readily definable, has been disporting himself with rent boys. Neither job is quite what it seems. Judith, who knows perfectly well what her husband is up to, has designs Mullet can't fathom. And despite Vincent's warnings that abalone poachers aren't restrained by social niceties, Marina doesn't intend to turn the thieves over to the law but contemplates a more personal revenge. As the two cases grow inexorably into one, synthetic but highly effective tension is supplied by dialogue clipped within an inch of its life and an attitude toward sudden death so casual that it takes some truly nasty behavior to get the attention of Mendes Saldana. Cole supplies this behavior in abundance. Like-minded readers will especially relish the scene in which Mullet's one-legged girlfriend is tied down and threatened with sodomy by her lover as the bad guys hold him at gunpoint. A truly scarifying race to the bottom. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
