Pepetela has continued to be a prolific writer throughout the 2000s. His work has taken a satirical turn with the series of "Jaime Bunda" novels, detective novels that cast a satirical view on life in Luanda in the new decade. Stephen Henighan writes that the character of Jaime Bunda, a bumbling detective with roots in two of Angola's most prominent families, represents the changes that the Luanda Creole population has undergone in the view of Pepetela. Rather than representing a revolutionary vanguard that will create a new Angolan identity, the Creoles of Luanda are depicted in the novels as a kleptocratic oligarchy. Jaime Bunda is a parody of James Bond, whose name stems from his oversized backside ("bunda" in Portuguese). The character is obsessed with both James Bond films and American private-eye novels, something that Henighan claims is "ideologically charged" and illustrates elements of Angola's underdevelopment. In the first of the novels, "Jaime Bunda, agente secreto", published in 2001, the protagonist investigates a murder and rape that eventually leads him to a South African counterfeiter named Karl Botha, a reference to former South African prime minister P.W. Botha, who had mandated the South African intervention in Angola in the 1970s and 1980s. The second novel, "Jaime Bunda e a Morte do Americano", published in 2003, is set in Benguela instead of Luanda, and deals with American influence in Angola, as Jaime Bunda investigates the murder of an American and tries to seduce an American FBI agent. This novel also presents Pepetela's critique of U.S. foreign policy, as the heavy-handed behavior of the Angolan police mirrors the ways that Americans dealt with suspected terrorists during the same period. The novels were published by the Portuguese publisher Dom Quixote and were extremely popular in Portugal, having also had some success in other European countries, such as Germany, where Pepetela had been relatively unknown in the past.