Thirteen Hours

The plot thickened throughout, threads of apparently different stories, weaving through the book, always requiring the reader to read on to get to the bottom of things. My first Deon Meyer and it won't be the last! Very readable

Excellent story, fast pace and an easy read. Being a South African, the places are familiar, but anyone can enjoy the talent of this exceptional author. I've read a few of his books, but will certainly get them all! Books which you can't put down!

This is a definate page turner. I find myself unable to put my kindle down. Cannot wait to read the next title by Deon Meyer. I would have preferred to read it in Afrikaans though. I have to say that the store's Afrikaans titles are VERY boring though.

The intertwining of the two plots was interesting and worked mostly. The final bit was too brutal with not a good enough reason. The climax was weak as well as the unravelling at the end. One felt let down by the end... as if the author is already planning his next book or follow up; which I am not keen to read.
Keep it simple and 'realistic' enough to ring true - even though it is a novel. I think the author tried something, but it did not work.

However, I thoroughly enjoyed Kobra [Afrikaans version]

Excellent action, vivid mental images, great pace. Loved the South African setting - makes a wonderful change from the usual stuff. Meyer gets the intrigue, surprises and engagement right. If I have any criticism it would be the number of coincidences - but I guess its the norm for this genre. Is Deon Meyer the South African answer to David Baldacci?

Afrikaner Deon Meyer's latest pulse-pounding thriller hits the ground running--literally. In Cape Town, South Africa, at six in the morning, an American teenage tourist is running for her life. Her best friend's throat was slit in front of her and she is bolting from the perpetrators' clutches. The story hits its stride early and swiftly as events unfold over thirteen-hours. Vicious outlaws and the snarl of conspiracy; Afrikaner, Xhosa, and Zulu crime-fighters; and crooners and corporate fleecers storm the pages of the book. Besides Rachel Anderson, the pursued and wily tourist, there's music industry giant, Adam Barnard, found shot and dead near his hard-drinking, faded-diva wife.

This is my third Meyer book (this is his seventh), after reading Dead at Daybreak and Blood Safari, all set in the author's home country. The narrative is bracing and the characters resonant and ripe. Meyer delivers with sizzle in this dual-crime novel; his terse prose lances the pages, and the pitch-perfect pace purrs and thrums. The reader feels like a detective as fragments eventually pull together from the grime of corruption. You suspect, you speculate, and you quiver. The knot of Barnard's death is teased out concurrently with Rachel's web of intrigue. Meyer is brilliant at interlocking disparate characters, events, and scenes, and at solving parallel puzzles.

The crisp story is supported by trenchant characters. Benny Griessel, the Slavic-eyed, bushy-haired Inspector with a sinking marriage and six months sobriety, has a sharp radar and a fox's energy, as well as a tarnished reputation. He pursues the perps with thirsty zeal while trying to keep his inner demons at bay. Can he save his marriage? Can he rescue the girl? Will the lure of drink undo him? Benny struggles to keep it together while people's lives are falling apart.

Fransman Dekker, an apt, avid cop with a strident temper, is furious about the racial hiring practice in the department. He's close to losing his cool over the results of affirmative action--not black enough, not white enough, feeling the statistical stab of "eight percent coloured." His nemesis, Zulu Mbali Kaleni, is one of the most delightfully imperious and exotic policewomen I have come across in fiction. She looks like an "overstuffed piegeon," with a "big bulge in front and a big bulge behind in her tight black trouser suit." Dekker, Griessel, and Kaleni, like the other players in the book, are dimensional and sympathetic. Meyer has a knack for fiery characters that vault from the pages while they crackle and burn.

The story is taut and the climax is gripping. Although more cinematic and conventional than his previous work, Meyer's brio is seductive, his pointed narrative is spicy. Some parts are predictable, yet without feeling tired and shopworn. He tells the story with a candid depth that is wholly humane and authentic. A primal essence buzzes and hums as he juxtaposes scenes, cutting from one jolting moment to the next. And although I am typically put off by cell phone bits in a novel, Meyer's snappy insertions actually increase the story's tensile strength. The chapters revolve around the clock and the minutes fly with the pages. He controls the fluid narrative with an acid restraint and never goes overboard. It vibrates with soul, but it's not for the faint of heart.

In his best and most complex novel yet, Afrikaans-writer Deon Meyer recreates thirteen hours of life in Cape Town, South Africa, hour by terrifying hour, revealing more about the city's many criminal cultures than you may want to know. The police who try to keep the criminal underworld at bay are undermanned and undertrained. A series of police scandals has led the National Commissioner to establish a whole new South African Police Service (SAPS), retaining the best and most experienced officers within new departments and hiring new recruits from all racial groups. Racial differences, tribal differences, and changing historical roles add to the complexities here as good people try to prevent crimes in a fraught and changing environment in which the Metro Police are also flexing muscles over control, and private security agencies perform their own investigations.

In the opening pages, a young girl, still in her teens, is tearing through the city, begging for help from people she sees, as she tries to escape five or six young men who are pursuing her. Her companion, who was also trying to escape these men, now lies dead, her throat slit and her backpack stolen. SAPS Captain Benny Griessel and his young, inexperienced staff are assigned to this case, and soon have their worst fears realized. The young victim was an American tourist, with all the governmental complications that entails on all levels. At the same time, the body of a music executive, shot in the head with his own gun, is found at home near his wife, an alcoholic who knows of his flagrant affairs and who has been lying passed out for hours. She appears to have shot him.

As Benny and his staff investigate, these separate stories interrupt each other as more information is revealed about each crime in the course of the day. The author keeps the suspense at fever pitch. Rachel Anderson, the girl trying to escape, must evade discovery for many hours, while Benny Griessel must keep all the leads for two separate cases going in the right direction and find Rachel before her pursuers do. The main characters' own backgrounds and family lives unfold and add depth to the novel, showing how they live, for better or worse, in the newly integrated society. As the novel develops further, the ins and outs of the not always honest music business, the roles of Russian owners and managers of clubs and bars, the weaknesses of police officers who may be offered enormous bribes, illegal immigration from other African countries whose governments are in total disarray, the problems of a drug culture, and the corruption which seems to be an unfortunate natural result of power all appear as well integrated themes and plot lines.

Despite the darkness of its plot, Afrikaans writer Deon Meyer honors hard-working and honest people of all races in this novel--Benny Griessel (white), bright new detective Vusumuzi Ndabeni (black), no-nonsense female investigator Mbali Kaleni (black), and pathologist, Tiffany October ("coloured"). These people and others like them are the future of the country and its hope, and Deon Meyer, an Afrikaaner, celebrates them within the context of a society in transition. Mary Whipple

Blood Safari
Dead at Daybreak

My purpose here is simply to relate my very favorable reactions to this author’s books and how I think I came to them. The school of book reviewing that focuses on discussion of plot lines and characters portrayed is one I dropped out of long ago. I am now on my fourth Deon Meyer book and only with difficulty did I tear myself away to write this review. The three I have finished are Trackers, Thirteen Hours and Seven Days. There was no order in mind as I bought them. Each book so far has fitted neatly into either police procedural genre or the broad spy/thriller category. But the store lists for sale over 15,000 of the former type and 267,000 of the latter. So far, for my money, Deon Meyer ranks in the top 1% of the top 1% in both categories. Whatever differences separate the three I’ve finished so far, they all rate 5+ stars in both quality and pleasure afforded; they earn my strongest positive recommendation.

About thirty pages into to each of these books, I said to myself, “I haven’t read anything of this type so good in at least a year, not since the last one by …xyz”. And for each Meyer title a different favorite author came to mind. Meyer vies with Lee Child in creating vivid characters of simple, direct interest and gut-wrenching moral force and clarity. And for Child only Jack Reacher reaches this Olympian level; I can think of four such vibrant characters in my first three Meyer books, and any of them could (and I hope will) support a long-running series. The second author Meyer brought to mind is Michael Connelly and his Bosch books. The plotting in both men’s books is intricate but water-tight, with action tightly linked to characterization and details never flashy or implausible. The third writer Meyer’s books have evoked for me is Louise Penny. Two comparisons with her Gamache books stand out: Here are two rare authors whose characters can muse – sometimes for a few pages at a clip -- about their relationships to the natural and civilized worlds and hold both your attention and your heart with the honesty and depth of feeling portrayed. Second, both Penny and Meyer often write sentences so elegantly beautiful in both construction and sentiment that one delights in rereading them immediately. (The work of Meyer’s translators and editors seems impeccable, but there seems and even deeper and more satisfying achievement in the original conception of what has been constructed into sentences and paragraphs.)

To put my opinion of these four “top” authors already mentioned in context: Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti, Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon and Robert Crais’ Joe Pike head series that are, in my estimation, just a shade or two behind Penny, Child, Meyer and Connelly. Jonathan Kellerman and Alex Berenson are constants on my bookshelf and very good, but a distinct notch below the seven writers mentioned earlier.

To the Kindle edition publisher(s): The lack of extra space or rule-lines to signify when the author is switching time or character-focus detracts a lot from the clarity of the text. I presume the hard copy editions have such; it would seem the investment of a mere few hours to resolve this.

Author Deon Meyer has delivered a taut thriller about a single day in the life of South African police detective Benny Griessel and his quest to find Rachel Anderson, a young American backpacker missing in Capetown. Her backpacking friend murdered in a churchyard, Rachel is on the run from a mixed-race gang, trying desperately to elude both her pursuers and the police, whom she distrusts. Making Benny's job all the more daunting, he is mentoring Inspector Visumuzi Ndabeni, who is nominally in charge of the case; as a black officer leading his first case involving the death of a white girl from an influential foreign family, he is obsessed with getting it right. Added to the mix is another black officer assigned to the hunt for the missing girl: Detective Sergeant Mbali Kaleni has her own agenda, composed of equal parts of race, gender, and personal hostility. It is an explosive combination in the still-caste-ridden culture of urban South Africa.

Meyer is a strong believer in the importance of setting. In Thirteen Hours the focus is not on the natural landscape, but on the social setting: the petty rivalries between the various South African police forces, and the racism between tribal blacks, and between blacks and what are still termed "coloureds" in contemporary South Africa. A fast-paced suspense tale told from multiple viewpoints, Thirteen Hours will hold you in your seat until the very last page.

--Jim Napier, Professional crime fiction reviewer and creator of the award-winning website [...]

Thirteen Hours is just that. Perhaps it's an unusually busy workday for Benny Greissel who begins as a police Inspector and ends as a Captain, but it's jampacked with the twists and turns of two politically volatile cases.

Benny has personal issues as all the great policemen in procedurals do, but he seems to have a handle on them, and they give him an unusual empathy for suspects and colleagues alike. Not all of them, though. Benny can also be a take no prisoners kind of guy and excuses himself from interrogating a suspect because he fears he will do violence to the man.

Both cases hit close to home for Benny. In the one he gets called out to at 5 a.m., the murder victim and the only eyewitness are girls his daughter's age, and the witness is fleeing for her life. The problem is she's an American who doesn't trust the Capetown police after misunderstanding comments from the murderers. Her dash across the city is a gripping, white-knuckled adventure but Rachel from Indiana is no Mary Sue and gives as good as she gets. The other case is the murder of a prominent record executive whose alcoholic wife is found passed out by the body with the murder weapon at hand. Benny recognizes the wife as a former pop star he'd greatly admired and is saddened by the depths to which she has fallen. That's not all they have in common, though and since all is not as it seems, Benny goes out on a limb for her, that he may or may not have sawed off in a rash but compassionate act.

Benny is an imperfect human being, but he means well. In addition to action, detective work and suspense, his Thirteen Hours is loaded with the frustrations of a society in turmoil. For example, just when he's on the verge of uncovering a clue, the power goes out. He handles everything if not with grace, at least with a ready Plan B. His reactions to lack of manpower, racial tensions, the pressure the US Consul is placing on the Capetown Police to rescue Rachel and his empathy with Rachel's frantic parents make this an unusually gripping story. The best feature is the way the two cases are connected. All the clues are provided and the denouement is one of the best ahas, I've read in a long time.

The setting is of course, Capetown, SA. Meyer gives the reader a fascinating glimpse into a very different culture made the more tantalizing because some of the customs and institutions resemble those of the urban US. The book is liberally laced with Afrikans words and phrases. The reader has the luxury of a glossary at the end of the book, or can do what I did, which is savoring them as adding depth and texture to the story by guessing the meanings.

I liked Meyer's Blood Safari, but I loved Thirteen Hours. Meyer's skill at plotting, sense of place and characterizarions are comparable to Robert Parker's or Robert Crais and the exotic (to me) setting makes it a thrilling read.

A fast paced South African crime novel that reads like a cross between Peter Temple and the TV series 24. Benny Griessel is a homicide detective, a recovering alcoholic who is hoping to win his wife back. He is woken early with the news that a American teenage girl's body has been found on the street. He quickly realizes that a second teenage girl is on the run, in fear of her life. His day gets more complicated by a second murder, the husband of a prominent singer. He needs to oversee both criminal investigations. The story takes place over the course of one day and is broken into segments of approximately an hour.

The book is set in Cape Town and the city and its problems - power cuts, heavy traffic, bureaucracy - are an intrinsic part of the novel. There are racial tensions between whites, coloureds, Zulus and Xhosas. There is a large and complicated cast of characters, but they are all interesting, rounded and believable.

My only critique is that the pace is somewhat erratic, swinging between breathless action, grinding criminal investigation and social commentary. However the real time element keeps the tension up. This is highly recommended.