Blessed Are the Dead: An Emmanuel Cooper Mystery (Detective Emmanuel Cooper Book 3)

Malla Nunn has written another gem. A beautiful young Zulu girl, daughter of a chief, is found murdered, but the cause of death is unknown. She is resting peacefully, with flower petals strewn around her. Detective Emmanuel Cooper and his partner Constable Samuel Shabalala are brought in to investigate, and have to deal with resentment at the farm where Amahle worked, her desire to avoid an unwanted marriage, tensions in her tribe, indifference by the local police, all in the context of tenuous black-white relations in South Africa. ( )

Blessed are the Dead finds DS Emmanuel Cooper and DC Samuel Shabalala traveling to the tiny town of Roselet where the body of an young Zulu girl named Amahle Matebula has been found covered in wildflowers on a hillside in the Drakensberg Mountains, halfway between her father’s kraal and the Afrikaner farm where she worked as a maid. Her family, headed by a chieftain with five wives, demands the release of her body from the local medical office and the doctor refuses to have anything to do with an autopsy. This will be the impetus to bring in our third main character, Dr. Zweigman. This tiny team of three will again band together to find the murderer. There are few clues at the crime scene other than a tartan blanket, but Cooper and Shabalala start to ask questions and eventually discover more clues as well as multiple suspects.

The Emmanuel Cooper mystery series by Malla Nunn is my current “most favored” series. It takes place in post-WW2 apartheid South Africa and the setting is incredibly important in each of the mysteries. The author does an excellent job of weaving the structure of apartheid into the story showing us how our main characters deal with the strict rules that segregate South African's into a separate-and-unequal role. These characters are totally alive, believable and incredibly conflicted. The most current book, Present Darkness, has just been released and I plan to pick that up as soon as possible. Blessed are the Dead is not only a riveting mystery where clues and carefully laid twists and turns but also an atmospheric story with an incredible depth in setting, characterization and history.
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I’m not much interested in detective novels, but I make an exception for Malla Nunn’s Emmanuel Cooper Mystery series because the novels are a blend of crime fiction with historical fiction set in the apartheid era in South Africa. As I said in my review of A Beautiful Place to Die, this series is

… much more than genre fiction. It reminded me of the best of Graham Greene in the way that the novel explores how context and culture impact on crime and justice, and how survival in an intransigently corrupt society involves an existential struggle between integrity and resignation to the inevitable.

Set in the 1950s i.e. before the British Dominion known as the Union of South Africa became a republic in 1960, the series consists of
1.A Beautiful Place to Die, see my review
2.Let the Dead Die, read but not reviewed because I couldn’t renew the book at the library and *smacks forehead* then forgot about it
3.Blessed are the Dead (also published as Silent Valley)
4.Present Darkness (on the TBR)

Blessed are the Dead again features Detective Sergeant Emmanual Cooper and his sidekick Zulu Detective Constable Shabalala out in the backblocks miles from Durban. High up in the Drakensberg Mountains, the land is farmed by people who live in a strict hierarchy based on colour and ethnicity backed up by legalised racial discrimination. The wealthy White English and the dirt poor White Afrikaaners treat each other with mutual disdain but they both consider themselves superior to Jews who have survived the Holocaust and the dispossessed Zulus who live in the kraals and cling to traditional ways.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/10/02/blessed-are-the-dead-by-malla-nunn/ ( )

I could only rate this a two star read as it was too slow for me liking. I like to read for fun, escapism, whatever and while this story may be an interesting read, listening to it was, at times, arduous. The story provided an interesting insight into the African apartheid system.

The best part of the book was the African character voices provided by Humphrey Bower.

At least I finished listening to this book, hence two stars. ( )