Michael Stanley is the writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. - Both are retired professors who have worked in academia and business. Sears is a mathematician, specializing in geological remote sensing. Trollip is an educational psychologist, specializing in the application of computers to teaching and learning, and a pilot. They were both born in South Africa.
They have been on a number of flying safaris to Botswana and Zimbabwe, where it was always exciting to buzz a dirt airstrip to shoo the elephants off. They have had many adventures on these trips including tracking lions at night, fighting bush fires on the Savuti plains in northern Botswana, being charged by an elephant, and having their plane’s door pop open over the Kalahari, scattering navigation maps over the desert.. These trips have fed their love both for the bush, and for Botswana.
It was on one of these trips that the idea surfaced for a novel set in Botswana. (Source: author website)
I have been watching Expedition: Africa which has only peaked my interest in this book.
Botswana Assistant Superintendent David "Kubu" Bengu is investigating the murders of two men in a remote bush camp. Of the men who died, one has the fingerprints of Goodluck Tinubu who died almost three decades earlier, during the Rhodesian civil war. The last small detail to set up the story… another guest at the camp has left suddenly, which makes him the prime suspect.
As the truth comes out and the crime is solved we learn about culture in Africa. A good, solid book for mystery/thriller fans.
Type: Mystery, 463 pages, Hardcover
Synopsis:Two vicious murders, only hours apart.
When two guests—Zimbabwean teacher Goodluck Tinubu and supposed South African tourist Sipho Langa—are bludgeoned to death at the isolated Jackalberry bush camp in northern Botswana, Detective David “Kubu” Bengu arrives from Gaborone to assist the local police.
Ishmael Zondo, another guest at the camp, departed unexpectedly at dawn the morning after the murders. Now Zondo has completely disappeared, and the Zimbabwe police are unable—or unwilling—to trace him. Reports surface that he is wanted as a dissident in Zimbabwe. And, as a final enigma, matching fingerprint records reveal that Goodluck Tinubu was killed in the Rhodesian civil war thirty years earlier.
Then the other guests at the camp start dying one by one. The local police have their own suspicions, but the wily Kubu believes that the obvious is not what it seems. Having discovered that everyone at the Jackalberry camp has something to hide, Kubu sets a clever trap to find the truth.
Reviews:
“Complex…should satisfy all armchair travelers and most mystery fans” – Kirkus Reviews