Book Review: Salamander Cotton

Reviewed By: Lynn Harnett

Salamander Cotton     Amazon US TPB Amazon US HC Amazon UK PB Amazon Canada TPB Amazon Canada HC
Richard Kunzmann
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Police Procedural
St. Martin’s Minotaur, Nov. 2007

Not since the late James McClure’s Kramer and Zondi novels has a crime writer taken readers so deeply into South Africa. Where McClure exposed the brutality and minutiae of the apartheid era, Richard Kunzmann sets his novels in the present – a present with deep roots in the past.

His second novel, “Salamander Cotton” opens with the murder of an old man, Bernard Klamm, who dies a more horrible death than anyone deserves. Or maybe no cruelty is too horrible for Klamm, who, Johannesburg Detective Jacob Tshabalala soon learns, grew rich on the blood of black asbestos miners, kept a cache of horrifying child pornography and may have killed his own daughter 39 years earlier for taking a black lover.

But this, too, is a picture soon blurred and shaded as Jacob realizes the answers lie in the past, in the isolated mining town of Leopold Ridge where Klamm made his money and his daughter disappeared. But the city’s budget won’t stretch to this. So resourceful Jacob arranges for his former partner Harry Mason (who retired after Kunzmann’s debut “Bloody Harvests”) to be hired by Klamm’s estranged wife. She wants someone to investigate her daughter’s disappearance and this is a job, Jacob is sure, which will help solve Klamm’s murder.

The center of the book belongs to Harry as he pokes into forbidden places in the dangerous town, where thugs administer the law and ghosts roam the hills. Point of view shifts mostly between Harry and Jacob, with some views from secondary characters including a vicious cop and a frightened dying man, which flesh out the complex narrative.

Various subplots and a narrative that moves back and forth in time gives the novel added depth, but also requires a bit of attention on the part of the reader to keep things straight. Kunzmann makes it well worth the effort.

Lynn Harnett

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Lynn Harnett