The Murder of Norman Ware

Book excerpt: The golfing eco-estate on the KwaZulu-Natal coast seems idyllic, with its diplomatic-level security, smarmy country club, and resort-style pools and restaurants. But beneath the luxurious and well-manicured surface, corruption, lechery, evil, and debauchery seethe. It is in this rotten stew that a series of seemingly random and coincidental events leads to the murder of one of the estate's most respected residents: advocate Norman Ware. As Detective De Villiers sifts through the witnesses and suspects--a philandering plastic surgeon, a harvester of body parts, a property tycoon, a serial killer with a penchant for teenage girls, a recluse with ophidiophobia, and a cross-dressing homophobe--the pillars of lies and deceit upon which the exclusive estate residents' lives have been built start collapsing. Clever and macabre, this South African novel plays with the ideas of fate and of action and consequence.