SOUTH AFRICAN CRIME FICTION 2024: LEO By DEON MEYER

Deon Meyer’s new novel, Leo (Hodder & Stoughton, 10 October 2024), has been a long time coming and for most of us the wait will be a little longer. It is due out in the United Kingdom on 10 October 2024 and will also be available in Australia on date, but only on Kindle. Wider hardback and paperback release in Australia and the United States is not until early 2025. The wait, however, is well worth it!

I have been lucky enough to read Leo and it is another outstanding crime novel by Meyer.

Leo is the ninth book by Meyer to feature South African detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido, and opens with the pair still exiled to the quiet, beautiful area of Stellenbosch for past misdemeanors. The run-of-the-mill police work in a leafy university town famed for its vineyards is a far cry from their previous life in Cape Town fighting crime at the highest level as part of the elite Hawks squad. Cupido is restless, but the former alcoholic Benny has more pressing things to worry about, it’s the countdown to his forthcoming wedding day.

Their relative peace is shattered, however, when a female student is found dead on a mountain trail, and the key suspect, a local businessman, is found murdered soon afterwards. He is killed in a particularly gruesome manner with fast-action filler foam sprayed down his throat. It seems like a professional hit to Griessel and Cupido, but their superiors are keen to dismiss it as a robbery. Regardless the detectives push on, with Benny knowing that he needs to stay calm and focused, and sober, to solve the crime and make it to his wedding day.

Meanwhile a gang of professional thieves, including the beautiful Christina Jaeger who we last saw in The Trackers, are planning a dangerous high stakes heist that brings them to the attention of corrupt officials. 

Leo is structurally similar to Meyer’s excellent The Last Hunt, with Griessel and Cupido pushing on with their investigation, while two different sub-plots run in parallel until the tense and unexpected conclusion. Two heists at the beginning and end of the book give the plot much of its excitement and suspense, while a mission of revenge by a former member of the South African Special Forces Brigade, Tau Berger, also adds spikes of action and violence. Meyer skillfully switches the action between Griessel and Cupido’s methodical investigation, the tension of the heists, and Berger’s bloody campaign, giving the book a good pace for most of its length. There are some slow patches, and too much focus on the wedding, but the final third, or so, of the book more than makes up for it. I could not stop reading the final chapters, and, as with most of Meyer’s books, I had no idea how it was going to end and who was going to survive.

As usual the characterisations are rich and convincing. Benny is the typical hard-worn detective trying to overcome a drinking problem and get his life back into order, but the depth of Meyer’s characterisation lifts him above the rest of the pack. Benny is no super detective, but a hard-working, experienced cop who can make connections and is always determined to see a case through to the end. While Cupido is Benny’s slightly flashier and very loyal partner. There is also genuine poignancy in Benny’s attempts to reconnect with his adult children. The other characters also ring true, and none of them are saints. They have good and bad sides to them, and Meyer does not endow his thieves with pure motives. They are professionals doing a job.

Meyer has a good ear for dialogue, and he seems to accurately capture the tone and rhythm of the conversations between the various characters. The descriptions of life in South Africa are vivid, but do not overwhelm the book. Some basic knowledge about the recent past in South Africa, especially the corruption and ‘state capture’, would help with the understanding of the story, but most of it can be easily gleaned from the book. The social decay and poverty are smoothly woven into the story and there is a subtlety in how Meyer deals with racial issues, with small references giving some sense of how it is now:

“‘And then I noticed she was uncomfortable, the way she touched her head like that, and I thought that’s what some white people do when they criticise the government in front of a man of colour.’
‘True that.'”

There is lots of darkness in Leo, but also flashes of humour, especially in an opening scene when Griessel and Cupido are interviewing a young woman who wants them to arrest another woman for stealing the IP off her Instagram story:
“She had been robbed…
She drew a slow breath to calm down. ‘I posted an Insta story,’ she said. ‘Yesterday. And Kayla Venter stole my intellectual property.’ … ‘She took my story and she changed it and she posted it'”

Overall, Leo is another stunning book by Meyer. The pace is a little slower at times, but the bloody conclusion more than makes up for it. One of my favourite books of the year!

As mentioned above, Leo is released in the United Kingdom on 10 October 2024 and on Kindle in Australia on the same day. Paperback and hardback release in Australia and the United States is not until January and February 2025 respectively.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy of the book for review.

By the way, the Netflix adaption of Meyer’s Heart Of Hunter is now available on that streaming service in Australia and is well worth watching.