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In the crumbling heart of Yeoville, Johannesburg, a ruined block of flats holds more than its ghosts.
Shalom Court was once whites-only, then home to hundreds after apartheid's end — until it was gutted, abandoned, and left to rot by owners who found more profit in its ruin than its repair. Now squatters shelter in its stairwells, criminals move through its shadows, and the siblings who inherited it are locked in a war over its fate that has curdled into something closer to hatred than family.
Then the mutilated body of a middle-aged white woman is found in the basement.
As a police psychologist and a bungling CID detective take up the case, a marginalized journalist named Mendel Guttman starts digging into a story far bigger than one murder — a story of eviction and greed, corrupt bureaucrats and petty criminals, squatters with nowhere else to go, and a family whose inheritance has become a battlefield. Because everyone with a claim on Shalom Court, from the Metro official taking bribes to the Neo-Nazi sympathizer upstairs to the brother spiraling through drug-induced psychosis, has a reason to want the truth left buried with the body.
ALLAN KOLSKI HORWITZ was born and raised in South Africa. In his twenties, he moved between the Middle East, Europe, and North America, before returning to live in Johannesburg in 1986. Since then, he has worked as an organizer and educator in the South African trade union and social housing movements. He is a writer, songwriter, and singer, a member of the Botsotso Jesters poetry performance group, and sits on the Botsotso Publishing editorial board. His short fiction has been published in three collections: Un/common Ground, Out of the Wreckage, and Meditations of a Non-White White. He has received the Olive Schreiner Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Short Fiction.