Cape Greed

In Cole's colorful, gritty debut, ex Cape Town cops Jeffrey "Mullet" Mendes and Vincent Saldana team up to start a detective agency. It's slow going at first, but maybe that's just as well since Saldana hasn't been sober 24 hours since his wife died in a car accident five months ago. Mendes keeps body and soul together selling pot and fishing on his beloved boat, the Maryjane. Then two cases come in at once. Mendes gets the errant husband surveillance while the sultry-voiced client requests Saldana, "a major abalone buster in the Anti-Poaching Unit." Abalone, an expensive aphrodisiac in the Far East, is heavily poached in the wild and now Marina Welsh's new abalone farm has been burgled and she wants Saldana to catch the thieves on their inevitable return. Meanwhile Mullet's boring guy is having chaste dates with a much younger woman. His girlfriend, Rae-Ann, wants to move in and she wants the homeless kid who sleeps on his step to go. And Saldana, at east temporarily dried out, wants to use his boat in the abalone farm sting. Point of view segues between the two main characters and several villains - led by Jim Woo, who operates an urban hunting safari and, in a paragraph of musing, connects Mullet's and Saldana's cases. Woo is a slick and chilling villain, but his off-the-rails gay employees, Tommy Fortune and Adonis, are hair-raising in their unpredictable and gleeful violence. Cole, pseudonym of South African writers Mike Nicol (Horseman) and Joanne Hichens, takes us on a vivid tour of multiracial Cape Town, where street boys are planted headless in beachside dunes, and lawlessness has the edge among rich and poor. Cole's prose is spare and vivid and the characters come across as true individuals. Readers will hope to see more of Mullett and Saldana navigating the noirish alleys, compounds, and estates of their country.

A successful conspiracy of co-authors Mike Nicols and Joanne Hichens under the pseudonym of Sam Cole, Cape Greed is set in Cape Town, South Africa, from the poverty-riddled streets where homeless boys sleep in doorways to the pristine coast where abalone farmers nurture their precious crops for export to the Far East. There sophisticated appetites create an ongoing demand for these priceless aphrodisiacs. But times are tough for ex-cop Jeffrey "Mullet" Mendes and his alcoholic partner Vincent Saldana. Mullet holds down the PI fort, accepting any assignment while Vincent buries his grief after the loss of his beloved wife in drunken binges. When two jobs come in simultaneously, Mullet can't say no. One is surveillance on behalf of Judith Oxford, who suspects her husband, a wealthy financial consultant, of infidelity. The other is a request by Marina Welsh for Saldana to patrol her abalone farm on the coast. Poachers have raided the abalone fields recently and Marina is afraid they will strike again soon. Money in the bank- that is, if Mendes can get Vincent to sober up for a few days. Meanwhile, the Oxford job is mind-numbingly dull. But a few coincidences join the two investigations and reveal a far more sophisticated scheme at play. Add in Jimmy Woo, a Triad operative gone rogue and there are not only international implications but a psychotic brutality rarely seen, even by an ex-cop. The characters are random, some menacing, others victims of a third-world economy, Mullet caught in a personal conundrum when his girlfriend decides to move into his place on a permanent basis. With a street kid crashing on his back porch, his boozy partner bunking at the office and the discovery of a series of young boys' bodies absent their heads, this PI is unprepared for the violence that is unleashed in his life as the two cases converge. The authors capture the rhythm of South Africa's poverty, greed and despair, a population constantly in flux, the weak ever the victims of the powerful and decadent, from Jimmy Woo's exploitation of street boys to Judith Oxford's demands for photographs of her husband, from Mullet's spunky one-legged girlfriend to the gallery of eccentrics who demand prompt delivery of their daily supply of marijuana, from the ex-con with a dark history with Vincent to Saldana's tragic dance with grief. Cape Town seethes with frustrations, opportunities and outrages, a thriller from start-to-finish. Luan Gaines/2009.