Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
A dark, intriguing, and satisfying tale with strong characters.
--Kirkus (Starred Review)
They find her body in the veld near Cape Town, South Africa. A teenager. She's not the first. Recently widowed Detective Jan Magson has to look mothers and fathers in the eye. Has to answer their questions. He can't. He can't even answer his estranged son's questions about how his wife died. Alone with his pistol at night, a good man faces his inner darkness.
A tense and grisly debut novel of suspense from South Africa.--Kirkus, starred review
After obtaining degrees in Psychology and Criminology, Martin Steyn studied serial killers and profiling. Dark Traces is his first novel in English.
DEBUT South African Police Warrant Officer Jan Magson works in Cape Town’s Violent Crimes Unit. Still grieving the loss of his wife, he is called to a crime scene just out of town. The pathologist, having discovered that the victim had been hanged before being dumped, remembers a similar recent case. When another body is found, and another girl disappears, Jan and his team find themselves on the hunt for a sadistic serial killer. At the same time, an attempted rapprochement with his estranged son in England does not go well when he refuses to answer his son’s questions on how his mother died. Fighting to hold it together so he can stay on the case, Jan races to find the killer before the body count gets higher.
VERDICT A damaged but determined detective is matched against a bold and intelligent killer in this captivating debut thriller. Steyn’s Cape Town will be familiar to any city dweller who no longer knows their neighbors and hides behind barred windows. [Catalyst is a new press devoted to African literature.—Ed.]
Library Journal
But the dream was always to write fiction, particularly realistic crime fiction. This led to much research into the South African Police Service and its forensic units. In 2014 Donker Spoor was published by LAPA Uitgewers, and was awarded the ATKV-Woordveertjie for Suspense Fiction the following year. In 2017 it will be published in English as Dark Traces. Steyn is the translator for Dark Traces.
Steyn prefers to tell the story through the eyes of the detective, that individual with the extraordinary task of finding justice for those whose final chapter ends up being written in a murder docket.