Trade Paperback, 222 x 146 mm, 304 pages RRP R145, ISBN 978-1-4152-0031-5 Publication date: April 2007, Category: Crime Fiction Description Tim Keegan’s novel is an hilarious, fast-moving romp through the Cape Town underworld, in which a range of unlikely characters find themselves caught up in a web of deception and intrigue of their own making. Being a satirical take on the crime detection genre in which nothing is as it seems, it is seldom clear who are the bad and who the good guys. Jake Tromp is a former soldier, heavy drinker, gun dealer and private eye who lost his home and his wife. Jake gets hired to recover money from a bogus scheme run by a crooked businessman by kidnapping his daughter. The plan goes wrong from the start when they kidnap the family’s au pair instead. The street-wise au pair – the daughter of a Miami-based casino owner – assumes an active role in her own kidnapping and schemes with Jake to kidnap the businessman’s daughter and rip off her old man at the same time. Her father sends two Cuban-American heavies to Cape Town to track down the kidnapper and, through contacts in the intelligence community, hires the very same Jake Tromp to help out in the search for his daughter. The businessman’s . dubious lawyer gets involved, swiftly followed by an ex-cop, then more police, and with the Cubans on his case as well our friend Jake soon finds that dumb self-confidence isn’t enough to play this game on all sides. The result is a black comedy of double-dealing, false leads, confusion and many unlikely encounters. From Tromp’s Last Stand, pages 53-54 Jake’s in no mood for shit as he edges the bakkie, its lights off, across the rough ground towards the warehouse. The moon is behind a cloud and the uneven ground is black, in contrast with the yellow glow of neon lights that encircle the horizon. The last thing he needs here is a puncture. A flickering glow from behind the warehouse attracts his attention. Who the hell has made a fire – out in the open as well! The sound of voices reaches him. He gets out of the bakkie and peers around the corner of the wood-and-iron structure. A small party of vagrants, about five or six of them, men and women, are sitting around a small fire alongside a makeshift tent made out of plastic sheeting. They’re speaking the kind of taal you hear out on the Flats, a coarse, bastard tongue to his ears. What the hell are they doing here, with their dagga and their Tassies? He knocks on the door and Frikkie appears. ‘Those people? They arrived this afternoon. They say this is their ground. They lived here before they were thrown off. They were under a bridge last night, but the police came and told them to leave. Hey, Jake, I got the gun.’ To read on Amused at the old and the new South Africa alike, and it invites us to share in its wry mirth. Michiel Heyns, Sunday Independent Fulfils its promise to tell a strange tale of a strange man in an even stranger situation, and produces a few laughs in the process. Dianne Hawker, Cape Argus Keegan's rambunctious thriller has all the energy and confusion of a Marx Brothers' crowd scene. The story is set in a Cape Town brilliantly observed. Did I mention it is funny? It is. Very. Gus Ferguson, Sunday Independent E-mail us a comment on this book. (Comments may be edited and used on this website.) To buy this book www.exclusivebooks.com www.kalahari.net home   writers   books   contact   buy   rights all content © Umuzi, Random House Struik this website designed and maintained by Guanaco.co.za