Thirteen Hours

Deon Meyer is one of South Africa’s best crime writers, and this novel is the second in a series featuring policeman Benny Griessel. Benny is a good cop and an ordinary guy. He’s also an alcoholic and his drinking has destroyed his family. Thirteen Hours is set in Cape Town and the action, as the title suggests, spans thirteen hours. A backpacker goes missing and the cops must find her before the bad guys do. It’s an edge-of-the-seat ride and I promise you’ll be cheering Benny on.

Michael started this book one evening and finished it at four in the morning! You won’t put this one down. An American girl is being hunted on Table Mountain overlooking Cape Town. We don’t know why and neither does she. The one thing she does know is that if they catch her she will die. Meanwhile, under pressure from their bosses and the girl’s distraught father, the police try to put together the clues that may lead them to answers about where she is. Thirteen Hours is a great remedy for low blood pressure! 

I picked Thirteen Hours partly because it’s a good sample of the work of a major writer born, raised, and living in a part of the world different from ours. This book is probably the most suspenseful novel I’ve read in recent years, and it’s the novel I recommend to people who ask me how to write suspenseful books. Meyer is South African and writes in Afrikaans. It features Meyer’s great character Benny Griessel. The action is an American tourist running for her life from the people who killed her friend, and it’s one desperate chase that takes thirteen hours.