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A review by jeremyhornik
Trackers by Deon Meyer
4.0
A South African crime novel, originally in Afrikaans, and an unexpectedly good thriller. It didn't seem like it was going to be that way. It started in a disjointed way, cutting back and forth between characters. But the book has this crazy energy. The characters grew on me and at some point, I was into it, and just started churning on through.
The book, which the jacket flap will tell you is about Rhino smuggling, is actually three or four stories loosely connected in important ways. The lead characters are all trackers: a divorced woman who gets a job with the secret police, a bodyguard hunting down a gun, a fired policeman finding a missing husband. The pacing stutters along, often losing me for a moment in a large pile of characters ("Is that the one guy using an alias, or some other guy we've never seen before?") The prose has that gummy feeling that translations often do. It jumps genres within Crime... now it's a thriller, now a police procedural, now a spy story. But it works, in a crazy quilt sum-is-more-than-its-parts kind of way.
One odd resonance: all these Afrikaners are sitting at home on their couches watching Everybody Loves Raymond and CSI. I found that detail just weird, I can't say why. The book fights your attempts to distance yourself from these characters, even though they're on the other side of the world and smugglers and tough guys and getting into gunfights.
The book, which the jacket flap will tell you is about Rhino smuggling, is actually three or four stories loosely connected in important ways. The lead characters are all trackers: a divorced woman who gets a job with the secret police, a bodyguard hunting down a gun, a fired policeman finding a missing husband. The pacing stutters along, often losing me for a moment in a large pile of characters ("Is that the one guy using an alias, or some other guy we've never seen before?") The prose has that gummy feeling that translations often do. It jumps genres within Crime... now it's a thriller, now a police procedural, now a spy story. But it works, in a crazy quilt sum-is-more-than-its-parts kind of way.
One odd resonance: all these Afrikaners are sitting at home on their couches watching Everybody Loves Raymond and CSI. I found that detail just weird, I can't say why. The book fights your attempts to distance yourself from these characters, even though they're on the other side of the world and smugglers and tough guys and getting into gunfights.