Blood on the Veld

 

Blood on the Veld by S.A. McLain is a very well-conceived wildlife thriller. This is apparently the author’s second novel after a successful and award winning debut novel entitled When Red is Blue, which is surely a novel I should find time to read. I feel like I stumbled onto this book while mostly limiting my reading to books on Egypt and Kenya, this one mostly taking place in South Africa. However, a common theme to those books and this one is the incredible poaching of African wildlife that continues to occur, ultimately threatening massive herds of animals.

 

The protagonist is Christian Bekker who at the age of 17 killed one of the poachers, an act that he claims was in self-defense. However, there were shady things going on in the trial and the judge simply did not accept Bekker’s claim. Given his young age at the time of this event, the judge gave Bekker the choice of a lengthy prison term or permanent banishment from South Africa. He accepted the latter and he moved to London where he was leading a successful life after 20 years. During Bekker’s absence from the land of his birth, his father lost the family property where he worked hard to preserve the lives of African wildlife and to challenge the poachers’ grisly efforts. A major problem was the incredible wealth that could be obtained by poaching, especially elephants and rhinos, and the greed and corruption at all levels of police enforcement and government bureaucrats. When his father allegedly committed suicide and left evidence for his son of the corruption that was behind his loss of the family property, Bekker chose to ignore his banishment and return to Johannesburg. And then, Bekker became the target of the same corrupt forces which had driven him from the country and led to the death of his father.

 

I love this book. Having visited South Africa long ago, McLain’s descriptions of the beauty of the veld and what it was like to live there brought back stirring memories. Perhaps the level of corruption is hard to fathom, but only a little knowledge of the troubled history of South African makes that issue easier to understand. This book gets my strongest recommendation. Ms. McLain is indeed a gifted writer. She indicates that this book is the first one in a series about Bekker, and I eagerly await the next one.