“The clash of personalities that follows is delivered with unrelenting impact.” —Financial Times (London)
A young South African fatally injures a teenage black street girl with his Range Rover but is too drunk to know that he has hit her. His stepfather—who does know—makes sure she dies. The driver’s mother intends to keep her son ignorant of his fatal accident. Why should his life be ruined for a nameless girl? No one will ever care. But this case falls to Turner of Cape Town homicide, and he will not be bought or bullied.
Runtime
11h 6m
Release
03-12-19
Abridgement
Unabridged
Genre
Fiction/Thrillers
Description
During a weekend spree in Cape Town, a young, rich Afrikaner fatally injures a teenage street girl with his Range Rover but is too drunk to know that he has hit her. His companions—who do know—leave the girl to die.
The driver’s mother, a self-made mining magnate named Margot Le Roux, intends to keep her son in ignorance of his crime. Why should his life be ruined for a nameless girl who was already terminally ill? No one will care and the law is cheap. But by chance the case falls to the relentless Warrant Officer Turner of Cape Town Homicide.
When Turner travels to the remote mining town that Margot owns—including the local police and private security force—he finds her determined to protect her son at any cost. As the battle of wills escalates, and the moral contradictions multiply, Turner won’t be bought and won’t be bullied, and when they try to bury him he rediscovers, during a desperate odyssey to the very brink of death, a long-forgotten truth about himself …
By the time Willocks’s tale is finished, fourteen men have died, and he shows once again that he is the laureate of the violent thriller.
Praise
“Willocks’s thrillers are marked out by the elegance of the writing coupled with the brutality of the action. Memo from Turner is no exception.” —Mail on Sunday (London)
“It’s twenty-four years since Willocks’s Green River Rising was published. Memo from Turner is even better. It’s a devastating indictment of modern South Africa.” —Evening Standard (London)
“A violent thriller that pits integrity against corruption and expedience in an arid, pitiless landscape. As the corpses and moral contradictions multiply, Memo from Turner ticks all the boxes for righteous machismo.” —Guardian (London)
“Willocks holds nothing back in this impressive crime novel featuring a relentless and incorruptible black South African police officer…Fans of the gritty and gory work of James Ellroy and Paul Cleave will appreciate Willocks.” —Publishers Weekly
Author Biography
Tim Willocks is a novelist and screenwriter. Translated into twenty languages, his novels include The Religion, Bad City Blues, Green River Rising, and The Twelve Children of Paris. He has worked with major Hollywood directors, dined at the White House, and holds a black belt in Shotokan karate.
Narrator Biography
Peter Noble, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, grew up in South Africa and studied drama and music at the University of Cape Town. He has worked extensively as an actor, touring South Africa with a small repertory theater company, as well as working on radio, TV, and film.