When Aarti reviewed A Beautiful Place to Die recently, I was excited to read a murder mystery by a non-American-or-British author and set in a non-American-or-British place, and as I’ve said, a murder mystery featuring a male corpse. I can read about alive ladies doing things that alive people do. I don’t read that many murder mysteries, partly because it always seems to be women getting killed, and I get tired of reading about beautiful lady corpses. This probably happens more often than it seems to me to happen. It’s a murder mystery where the victim is male.

The beginning: British police detective Emmanuel Cooper comes to investigate the murder of an Afrikaner police captain in the small town of Jacob’s Rest. Which I guess is what I should have expected from a murder mystery that takes places in a small town in apartheid South Africa. It is a tale of murder, passion, corruption, and the corrosive double standard that defined an apartheid nation.Fwoo. The first in her Detective Emmanuel Cooper series, A Beautiful Place to Die marks the debut of a talented writer who reads like a brilliant combination of Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene. Instead, he strikes out on his own, following a trail of clues that lead him to uncover a shocking forbidden love and the imperfect life of Captain Pretorius, a man whose relationships with the black and coloured residents of the town he ruled were more complicated and more human than anyone could have imagined. He may be modest, but he radiates intelligence and certainly won't be getting on his knees before those in power. But Detective Cooper isn't interested in political expediency and has never been one for making friends. When Detective Emmanuel Cooper, an Englishman, begins investigating the murder, his mission is preempted by the powerful police Security Branch, who are dedicated to their campaign to flush out black communist radicals. Tensions simmer as the fault line between the oppressed and the oppressors cuts deeper, but it's not until an Afrikaner police officer is found dead that emotions more dangerous than anyone thought possible boil to the surface. It is 1952, and new apartheid laws have recently gone into effect, dividing a nation into black and white while supposedly healing the political rifts between the Afrikaners and the English. In a morally complex tale rich with authenticity, Nunn takes readers to Jacob's Rest, a tiny town on the border between South Africa and Mozambique.

A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn