Deon Meyer - The Woman In The Blue Cloak

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good mystery

I enjoyed The Woman In The Blue Cloak. It’s a well done police procedural with an excellent backdrop of modern-day South Africa.

This novella is the latest in a series featuring Captain Benny Greisel. I hadn’t read the previous ones, but it works very well as a stand-alone book. It’s a good mystery beginning with the discovery of a body covered in bleach by the side of a country road and leads to a story of Old Masters and greed. I liked the quiet tone of the prose, which gives the book a sense of reality, as does the excellent picture of South Africa today as a very convincing but never intrusive backdrop. Meyer’s characters are well painted and the story, while perhaps not entirely plausible in the end, held me and kept me reading.

This is a brief book, and all the better for it, I think. It’s an enjoyable read and I’m encouraged to look out previous Benny Griesel novels. Recommended.

(My thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for an ARC via NetGalley.)