Vee, an investigative reporter, is determined to solve the disappearance of a teenaged girl who vanished two years earlier and is presumed dead. The crime and its solution were unexpected, and the characters were strongly developed. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, I did not have a clear picture of present race relationships, conflict, reconciliation, and opportunities. The main characters were identified by race, Black, White, or mixed parentage, but had difficulty remembering their racial background. Some of my favourite books have been crime novels set in South Africa, but I probably was missing some of its nuances or subtleties. This was the first book I completed reading in 2021 and was distracted by the COVID surge with new restrictions to figure out, the riot on TV, and a local safety alert. This was a slow read for me as I was having difficulty concentrating. Currently, she lives in Monrovia with her son and too many chickens. Her articles and short stories have featured in BBC, Granta, Omenana, Cassava Republic, Myriad Editions and other publications. She has written two novels (The Lazarus Effect, The Score). She is the winner of the 2017 Brittle Paper Award for nonfiction, longlisted for the 2019 NOMMO Award for speculative fiction and nominated three times for crime fiction. Golakai is on the Africa39 list of most promising writers under the age of 40. She now writes full time and moonlights as a literary judge, creative consultant and educator. A medical immunologist by training, she still enjoys performing autopsies and investigating peculiar medical cases in her spare time. She writes crime, speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, magical realism) and is in an unhealthy relationship with all twisted tales. Hawa Jande Golakai was born in Germany and hails from Liberia, where she spent a lively childhood before the 1990 civil war erupted. This is an enthralling debut by an exciting new author in the world of crime fiction. In compelling and witty prose, The Lazarus Effect is an evocative tale of the underbelly and otherworld of love, murder and madness in a Cape Town that visitors seldom see. How could a young girl leave home to play tennis one bright Saturday and never be seen again, and what do the dysfunctional circle of people she knew have to hide? Every thread Vee pulls in Jacqueline’s tight weave of intrigue brings her closer to redemption and an unravelling more dangerous than she bargained for. Desperate for answers, she and her new assistant Chlöe Bishop plunge into the disappearance of seventeen-year-old Jacqueline Paulsen.Īs Vee and Chlöe enter the maze of a case full of dead ends, the life of their intrepid missing girl reveals a family at odds – a dead half-brother, an ambitious father running from his past and the two women he has loved and ruined, a clutch of siblings with lies in their midst. A revenant haunts Vee’s steps – during her blackouts, the ghost of a strange teenage girl in a red woollen hat keeps reaching out to her. Now her career, like her sanity, is under fire. Suffering from misfortunes past and present, all Vee has is her work as an investigative journalist to hang on to. Voinjama Johnson is a woman on the brink of a dark, downward spiral.
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