Cobra by Deon Meyer

Hardback:  Cobra (2014) is the latest and fourth book in the brilliant Benny Griessel thriller series - introducing some marvellous new characters - with Deon Meyer's trademark page-turning finesse.

Benny Griessel is first on the scene of a bloodbath at a luxury guesthouse on a beautiful Franschhoek wine farm.

Two of the professionally executed dead are bodyguards, but there is no sign of the man they were meant to be protecting:  Paul Morris, a British citizen with a brand new passport, new suitcase, new clothes and no history, has been kidnapped.

The only clue is an engraving on every shell case - the flaring head of a spitting cobra.

In Cape Town, skilled pickpocket Tyrone Kleinbooi is drawing on all his considerable talents to pay for his younger sister Nadia's university fees.

Security guards arrest him after he steals a purse from a beautiful foreigner's handbag - but as they question him a figure enters and kills the security guards with consummate ease, leaving behind the distinctive cobra shell casings.

In the chaos, Tyrone manages to escape with his loot but he leaves his mobile phone behind.

Meanwhile Benny and his Hawk unit partners make some uncomfortable discoveries:  Morris's passport is fake and the British consulate is suddenly not very eager to cooperate.

The cobra casings are the mark of a ruthless assassin and the missing man is an eminent Cambridge mathematician.

Why would a mathematics professor from Cambridge University, renting a holiday home outside Cape Town, require a false identity and three bodyguards?

Where is he, now that they are dead?

What knowledge does he hold that is so desirable and so dangerous?

Investigating the massacre, Benny Griessel and his team find themselves being drawn into an international conspiracy with shocking implications.

It seems it is not just the terrorists and criminals of Britain and South Africa who may fear the Professor's work, but the politicians too.

Then, Nadia Kleinbooi is abducted...

Cobra was translated from the Afrikaans to the English by K L Seegers.

About the author:  Deon Meyer lives near Cape Town in South Africa.  His big passions are motorcycling, music, reading, cooking and rugby.  In January 2008, he retired from his day job as a consultant on brand strategy for BMW Motorrad, and is now a full-time author.  Deon Meyer's books have attracted worldwide critical acclaim and a growing international fanbase.  Originally written in Afrikaans, they have now been translated into twenty-six languages.

Thirteen Hours (2010) was shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger and won the Boeke Prize in South Africa - the first time in the prize's sixteen year history that a South African book has won.  His novels have also won literary prizes in France, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, and the film rights to seven of his novels have been optioned or sold.

Deon has also written two television series, and several screenplays for movies.  In 2013, he directed one of his original scripts for the feature film The Last Tango.

Visit the author's website and follow him on Twitter @MeyerDeon.

Rating:  5/5

Die Again by Tess Gerritsen

Hardback:  Die Again (2014) is the latest and eleventh heart-pounding thriller in the Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles bestselling series, the inspiration behind TNT's hit show Rizzoli and Isles.

When Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are summoned to a crime scene, they find a killing worthy of the most ferocious beast - right down to the claw marks on the corpse.

Only the most sinister human hands could have left renowned big-game hunter and taxidermist Leon Gott gruesomely displayed like the once-proud animals whose heads adorn his walls.

Did Gott unwittingly awaken a predator more dangerous than any he's ever hunted?

Maura fears that this isn't the killer's first slaughter, and that it won't be the last.

After linking the crime to a series of unsolved homicides in wilderness areas across the country, she wonders if the answers might actually be found in a remote corner of Africa.

Six years earlier, a group of tourists on safari fell prey to a killer in their midst.

Marooned deep in the bush of Botswana, with no means of communication and nothing but a rifle-toting guide for protection, the terrified tourists desperately hoped for rescue before their worst instincts - or the wild animals prowling in the shadows - could tear them apart.

The deadliest predator was already among them, and within a week, he walked away with the blood of all but one of them on his hands.

Now this killer has chosen Boston as his new hunting ground, and Rizzoli and Isles must find a way to lure him out of the shadows and into a cage.

Even if it means dangling the bait no hunter can resist: the one victim who got away.

About the author:  Bestselling author Tess Gerritsen is also a physician and she brings to her novels her first-hand knowledge of emergency and autopsy rooms.  Her thrillers starring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the hit TV series Rizzoli and Isles.  Tess's interests span far more than medicine and crime.  As an anthropology student at Stanford University, she catalogued centuries-old human remains and continues to travel the world, driven by her fascination with ancient cultures and bizarre natural phenomena.  She lives with her husband in Maine.  Visit her website for more information.

Rating:  5/5

Times Of Challenge And Controversy

Seduced By Madness: The True Story Of The Susan Polk Murder Case by Carol Pogash

Paperback:  She was fifteen when she visited the therapist;  still a teen when they first had sex.  She was twenty-five when she married him and forty-four when she killed him.

In October 2002, Susan Polk, the soft-spoken mother of three teenage boys, was arrested for stabbing her husband and former therapist, Dr Felix Polk, to death.

Three years later she was tried for first degree murder, choosing to act as her own attorney in a trial that rapidly devolved into one of the most outrageous media circuses in modern history.

The author, Carol Pogash, was there.

Here, Pogash provides a first-hand account of the wild, media-circus trial in which Susan defended herself and cross-examined two of her sons.  Illustrating how the prosecution and the court responded to Susan's volatile behavior, Pogash takes you inside the deliberation room and uncovers how jurors reached their surprising verdict.

To a crowded courtroom, Susan Polk presented her defense - a bizarre story of unethical therapies, abuse, repressed memories, and satanic rituals - and, in doing so, exposed her madness.

Seduced by Madness (2007) is the remarkably compelling, profoundly disturbing true story of the severe dysfunction of an affluent American family, as told by the leading journalist who worked the case.  With lyrical prose, Pogash skillfully traces the Polks' story - from their early yearnings for one another through their flawed marriage, which produced three highly intelligent but emotionally divided sons.

Weaving a complex narrative of a family who lived in multimillion dollar homes but lingered in the shadow of dysfunction, Pogash reassembles their life in the years and months before Felix's death, intimately describing what led this soft-spoken wife to murder.

It is a spellbinding recreation of a troubled life, a marriage, a murder, and a terrifying, inexorable descent into madness.

Currently, Susan Polk is incarcerated at the California Institution for Women (CIW), a dorm-like prison, in Corona (near Chino), CA.

She will be eligible for parole in 2017.

About the author:  Carol Pogash is an all-utility writer.  She has been a newspaper reporter and columnist, magazine writer and editor, TV reporter, internet editor and writer, radio essayist and author.  The program 60 Minutes hired her as a consultant.  She was the anchor interview on NBC Dateline and other TV news magazines.

Her stories are published in The New York Times on the front page and in National, Arts & Leisure, Business, Science, Style, Sports and the Op Ed sections.  She has covered AIDS, homelessness, a Golden Gate Bridge suicide barrier and the country’s first cat cafe.  Pogash tweets (@cpogash) but has yet to figure out how to earn a living doing it.

The Journey That Matters

Meretricious Persiflage

D H Lawrence (1885-1930)

Henry van Dyke (1852-1933)

Judge Righteously

Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915)

John Wooden (1910-2010)

Not A Gucci Bag or French-Cut Jeans

Peace Pledge

Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness and Multiple Murder by Jerry Bledsoe

Paperback:  1984.

The first bodies found were those of a feisty millionaire widow and her beautiful daughter in their posh Louisville, Kentucky, home.

Months later, another wealthy widow and her prominent son and daughter-in-law were found savagely slain in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Mystified police first suspected a professional in the bizarre gangland-style killings that shattered the quiet tranquility of two well-to-do southern communities.

But soon a suspicion grew that turned their focus to family.

The Sharps.

The Newsoms.

The Lynches.

The only link between the three families was a beautiful and aristocratic young mother named Susie Sharp Newsom Lynch.

Could this former child "princess" and fraternity sweetheart have committed such barbarous crimes?

And what about her gun-loving first cousin and lover, Fritz Klenner, son of a nationally renowned doctor?

"Susie has done this," were the first words David spoke when he heard about the second murders.

And when he continued to insist that Susie had to be involved, his mother broke her stunned silence, "Don't say that.  You don't know that, she's family."

Susie was on the minds of others that night.

For, later when the Newsoms heard about the killings, they telephoned Susie, offering to have someone come over and stay with her.

Susie declined, breaking off the conversation by saying, "Well, my dog has run off.  I've got to go find him.  I'll talk to you later."

A strange reaction to the revelation that her parents and beloved grandmother had been murdered...

Later, Forsyth County Sheriff Preston Oldham said, "There are a multitude of things that could have prompted it.  An exact, hard-core motive will never be known.  It could have been revenge.  It could have been greed.  It could have been personal problems.  It could have been child custody...This whole case...it's unreal how it was played out, almost like a dime-store novel with so many twists and turns..."

In this powerful and riveting tale of three families connected by marriage and murder, of obsessive love and bitter custody battles, Jerry Bledsoe, in Bitter Blood (1988) recounts the shocking events that ultimately took nine lives, building to a truly horrifying climax that will leave you stunned.

About the author:  Jerry Bledsoe is the author of the New York Times Number One bestseller Bitter Blood, as well as two other national bestsellers, Blood Games (1991) and Before He Wakes (1994), and many other books.  He has been contributing editor for Esquire, a reporter and columnist for the Greensboro, North Carolina, News & Record, The Charlotte Observer and the Louisville Times.  Three of his books were made into movies and mini-series for CBS, and a feature film of The Angel Doll was released for Christmas 2000.  His work also has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other publications.  He lives in Randolph County, North Carolina, with his wife, Linda.