We read thrillers to escape. In South Africa the monsters are outside your bedroom window

On any bestseller list, in any country, in any week you care to check, you will find a scattering of crime novels. Thrillers, mysteries, suspense novels, noir. These stories are the folk tales of our age, the descendents of the shivering fireside tales that give shape to our deepest fears. By rendering evil on the page, explaining it, punishing it, and nullifying it, we tap into something primordial.

There are few fears as deep as the loss of a child. Not only through disease or mischance, but the loss that takes place when a child disappears. There are few words that kindle such dread as "missing".

Margie Orford takes this as the central theme of Daddy's Girl, her third Dr Clare Hart novel. The vanished girl is the daughter of Riedwaan Faizal, a captain in Cape Town's Gang Unit, who is accused of abducting her himself to prevent her mother from taking her to Canada. She vanishes one evening while waiting to be collected outside her ballet school. Deranged with worry and outraged that he is a suspect, Faizal turns to forensic profiler Clare Hart for help, and together they begin to search for the child.

In this, what is essentially a prequel to her two earlier books Like Clockwork and Blood Rose, Orford is on top form. Her sense of place - the sandy drear of the Cape Flats, the mank of strip clubs in the daylight hours - is immaculate. Her writing is more assured, pithier, with snub-nosed dialogue and a sprinting pace.

Several years ago Orford conducted writing workshops with inmates at a Cape prison which resulted in an excellent book called Fifteen Men. It clearly also provided her with a rich stock of material because her gangsters in Daddy's Girl are stomach-turning. With names like Voëltjie Ahrend and Graveyard de Wet, she presents these brutes in chilling colour.

And there are other marvellous characters: the brave, damaged Pearl, daughter of a gangster who helps find missing girls; the feisty Rita Mkhize, Faizal's diminutive ally in the force; the creepy Mister Henry who plays piano at the ballet school.

The plotting is complex, strewn with red herrings, and Orford combines old-fashioned sleuthing (a pink hair clip found in a gangster's penthouse, a pen dropped on a mountain path) with state-of-the-art technology in the hunt for the little girl.

Orford is gaining a devoted audience overseas - she's selling in nine countries, in seven languages - and deservedly so. She's world-class. But I'd be interested to know how she and other South African "krimi" writers are selling on their home turf.

I suspect they are still being outsold by American, British and, lately, Scandinavian writers. This has nothing to do with an inferiority complex, a belief that local-is-not-lekker. It is simply this: we read thrillers to escape. They satisfy on a subliminal level because in murders being solved and justice being done order is restored and the world is somehow put to rights. The monsters have been aired and slain.

In South Africa the monsters are outside your bedroom window. Too few of them are captured; justice is rarely done. It is hard to get caught up in a fictional hunt for a missing girl when photographs of real ones look down from lamp posts.

As I write, the baleful mug of Donovan Moodley is splashed all over the newspapers, and I think of the long days when Leigh Matthews was missing. Too close, too close.

I admire Orford. She does not, as so many of us do, shy away from the violence in our society. She is a courageous journalist and a skilled writer, and she looks evil square in the eye. But I prefer my thrills from afar. Give me a serial killer in Maine or Skane any day.