Really 3.5 stars. A Afrikaner police captain is found murdered in a river, and the presiding officer's 12-year old sister does not pass along enough information so a single detective is sent to investigate. The matter quickly escalates to a political battle with the Security Service trying to pin the murder on a black Communist, while the detective enlists the help of the only black policemen and a local Jew, who runs a general store. There is much ado about race and intermingling in this well written mystery. ( )

Detective Sargent Emmanuel Cooper makes his debut in A Beautiful Place To Die as the only officer put in charge of solving the murder of an important Afrikaner in the small South African town of Jacob's Rest. This is no ordinary murder. This Afrikaner is Dutch-born Captain Pretorius and despite this being 1952 apartheid South Africa, Pretorius is liked and respected by everyone. Pretorius's strapping four sons are out for blood while racial tensions clash with color blind desires.
An Englishman, Emmanuel Cooper comes to the case as a complete outsider. He also comes with personal baggage from his soldier days in World War II. He can't shake daytime memories and haunting nightmares. He often hears voices and has an unfortunate deep addiction to pain medication; medication he feels is necessary to tame real and imagined injuries. To complicate matters, the Security Branch in charge of flushing out black communist radicals stand in Cooper's way of solving the crime. National Party laws crack down on acts of immortality between blacks and whites and Copper has plenty of suspects on either side of the color divide. ( )

This is the first book in a wonderful series featuring Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper, an Englishman who served in WWII, and still has nightmares about the horrors he's seen. It's 1952 and in South Africa the new apartheid laws have gone into effect, separating white from black and mixed race people. Cooper arrives in the small town of Jacob's Rest to investigate the alleged murder of a local Afrikaner Police Captain. Captain Pretorius is considered to be a fair, honorable, and very stern and straight laced man. As the policeman sent from a much larger city to solve the case begins investigating, he is shoved aside by government police who want to prove it was a communist plot committed by black agitators. Cooper is assigned the task of discovering who had been molesting young black women and uncovers a very nasty, covered up situation. Cooper is surrounded on all sides by brutal racists who don't like the direction he's taking. His only allies are a Zulu constable who won't talk, an old Jewish storekeeper who doctors in secret, and a young white constable named Hansie Hepple who is dumber than anyone Emmanuel has met before.

There are some rough language and adult themes in the book but it is a riveting mystery where clues and carefully laid twists and turns make this book a fast page turner as well as a fascinating view of South African history. The author draws the reader into both the setting and the hunt for the killer which leads to an unexpected revelation with dangerous consequences. This is a tremendous series with a conflicted hero in a fascinating setting. I'm planning to order the next two books of the series, Let the Dead Lie and Blessed are the Dead, today.
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Based on the author’s childhood in 1950s apartheid South Africa, this atmospheric series debut about an English detective’s investigation into an Afrikaan police officer spins with secrets & lies.

Beautifully written, and so suspenseful that I almost abandoned the book before the last chapters, so fearful was I of a miserable ending. It was worth the finishing. ( )