BLOOD SAFARI

Top-notch thriller from South African Meyer (Devil’s Peak, 2008, etc.) about a young woman’s desperate search for her dead brother.

More than 20 years ago, 14-year-old Emma le Roux suffered the wiping out of her loving family. First her adored soldier brother Jacobus disappeared somewhere in the vast wilds of Kruger National Park while chasing poachers, then her parents were killed in a car crash. By the time she hires narrator/protagonist Lemmer to protect her from unknown assailants, gutsy Emma has overcome grief and bereavement to become a lovely, successful career woman, brand consultant to major corporations. Lemmer (he hates his first name) is a professional bodyguard employed by a leading executive-security firm called Body Armor. Emma seeks his help as the result of a chain of events both sudden and terrifyingly inexplicable. Three days ago on Cape Town television, she tells Lemmer, she saw a photo of a certain Jacobus de Villiers. After factoring in the passage of time, she decided that he was a look-alike for Jacobus de Roux and that reports of her brother’s death had been meretriciously exaggerated. She asked questions, then someone tried to murder her. Is this cause and effect she thinks it is? Are there uncomfortable secrets powerful people would prefer to keep buried? Cool, tight-lipped Lemmer, hiding his own uncomfortable secrets, has no answers for Emma. What he does have, however, will prove considerably more useful as her dangerous investigation intensifies. It’s commitment. Unswerving and total. For tough, skilled, resourceful Lemmer, the very template of a modern-day warrior, has fallen in love.

Overplotted as usual, but when Meyer gets the people right, as he does here, he’s hard to beat.