BOOK BITES | Onyeka Nwelue, Hannah Richell, Scarlett Thomas

The Nigerian Mafia: Johannesburg ****
Onyeka Nwelue
Jacana Media

Nigerian Uche Mbadiegwu finds himself in deep trouble after running away from his problems in Brazil with the help of a Sierra Leonean diplomat.

In Joburg, Mbadiegwu meets dangerous and powerful people — Chinese businessmen, Indian loan sharks, drug dealers, Professor Bern Steyn (a renowned criminologist) and Tim Cletus, a self-proclaimed Nigerian pastor who is involved in trafficking women and visa fraud.

Mbadiegwu is hired to kill an editor of a newspaper, a pastor and to break the arms and legs of debt defaulters. The Nigerian Mafia: Johannesburg is brilliant in how it takes the reader into the underbelly world of crime, deception and power plays.

It also deftly weaves a bit of the xenophobic attacks that happened in Joburg. — Busisiwe Ntsamba

The Search Party ****
Hannah Richell
Simon & Schuster 

The Search Party is a thriller about a glamping weekend gone horribly wrong. Told from multiple points of view and moving back and forth in time, it’s a suspenseful story that keeps the reader guessing right up until the end. The basic premise: architects Max and Annie have ditched the London rat race for life on the Cornish coast with their troubled son Kip, where they have set up a glamping site as a business. Before opening it up to the public they invite their former university friends and their families to join them for a reunion weekend that goes wrong when the weather turns bad and someone goes missing.

Lots of themes, smoke and mirrors skilfully played, tautly plotted and completely gripping with a satisfyingly surprising ending. It’s a great ride. — Gill Gifford

Newlyweds Evelyn and Richard's honeymoon at a swish hotel on a paradisiacal Greek island escalates into the antithesis of marital bliss in this deliciously dark tale featuring characters who thrive — and rely — on secrets as means to conceal their true selves.

On their arrival, enigmatic proprietor Isabella shares the story of the “the sleepwalkers”: a wealthy couple who, when staying at the hotel the year before, mysteriously drowned. And a storm is brewing once again: both of the atmospheric low-pressure disturbance variety and a literary one... This novel, predominantly narrated by unreliable-narrator-par excellence, Evelyn, escalates into a story where clandestine pasts are revealed and forced to be confronted as the couple begin to realise that the secrets harboured by the mysterious island-dwellers jeopardise their lives.

Thomas takes the epistolary novel to another dimension as she intertwines letter-writing with audio transcripts, hotel guestbook messages and lists of images, which can make for a confusing read, yet adds to the chaotic nature of this electrifying thriller fuelled by macabre humour, idiosyncratic characters, past shames and present schemes. Overlook Hotel, eat your heart out. — Mila de Villiers