The Artful Egg
by James McClure
Category: Fiction

Two detectives hunt for a woman’s killer in apartheid-era South Africa: “The pace is fast, the solution ingenious” (The New York Times Book Review). Named one of the 100 Best Crime Novels of the 20th Century by The Times (London) Naomi Stride was a wealthy woman, and her death has left several people richer—none more so than her twenty-six-year-old son, Theo, with whom she long had bitter differences over money. She was also a controversial woman, a writer whose novels had been banned in South Africa. But was it for money, politics, or some other unknown reason that she was killed? And why was her naked corpse strewn with flowers and herbs? These are the questions South African Lt. Tromp Kramer and his Zulu partner, Mickey Zondi, must answer. But the task becomes much more difficult when Kramer is unexpectedly taken off the case. Ordered by his superiors to discreetly “wrap up” a fatal accident that could be embarrassing for the South African police, he is plunged into a second investigation—and he and Zondi find themselves moving inexorably toward a haunting and horrifying climax. Gold Dagger Award winner James McClure is “a distinguished crime novelist who has created in his Afrikaner Tromp Kramer and Bantu Sergeant Zondi two detectives who are as far from stereotypes as any in the genre” (P. D. James, bestselling author of Death Comes to Pemberly).