These are among the books that landed on my desk in August. Some of them will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

The Shadow State – Why Babita Deokaran had to die, by Jeff Wicks (Tafelberg)

Just a cursory read of the opening pages of this book is enough to enrage one. Within a very brief period of the acting CFO and whistleblower of the Gauteng Health Department being shot in her car outside her home early on August 23, 2021, the crime scene had been abandoned.

In fact, writes prize-winning author and News24 investigative journalist Jeff Wicks, the police left the crime scene around the same time the ambulance taking Deokaran to hospital. Her bloody, bullet-riddled car was abandoned in the street where it had come to a stop, her handbag, cellphone and laptop were inside it. There was no crime-scene tape securing the area.

Later that day Deokaran’s brother moved the car into her garage (he didn’t want her 16-year-old daughter to see it) and removed the handbag and devices.

It was at sunset, hours later, when senior detectives from Gauteng’s Serious and Violent Crimes Unit arrived, and did what police are supposed to do. And then, just days later, the Hawks took over the investigation – “someone with a lot more brass on their shoulders had pulled rank”, writes Wicks.

Then the Hawks proceeded to do nothing, too.

This book looks fascinating but enfuriating.

Confessor Cop – The detective who persuaded killers to talk, by Captain Jonathan Morris, as told to Michael Behr (Kwela)

It’s pretty handy when you, as a Serious and Violent Crimes cop, have a gift: you can persuade killers to confess. This is a book about one such cop, Captain Jonathan Morris of Mitchell’s Plain, who has an impressive record of solving crimes behind him.

Author Michael Behr writes: “this is a true story, although at times it doesn’t seem like it. At times it seems like a nightmare. The cop’s nightmare. His trauma… How he suppressed it to do his job. How it got him in the end. It’s a story about his cop life, and his home life, his wives, his children, his mother.

“…he’s a man with a story. It’s a story about what cops have to deal with daily, serious stuff that is something difficult to read. Stuff like this…”

And Behr launches into the Sizzlers’s case, the gay massage parlour in Sea Point attacked by murderers in January 2003.

Two handguns were used to shoot nine terrified rent boys in the back of the head. One who refused to lie on his stomach was shot in the face. Kitchen knives were then used to slit their throats. There were four survivors, but within hours three had died.

There was one precious survivor who might be able to tell detectives what happened.

Eish.

A History of the World in Six Plagues – How contagion, class and captivity shape us, from cholera to Covid-19, by Edna Bonhomme (Dialogue Books)

I used to be a health reporter, and I loved it. I loved the way the beat provided three different types and sources of stories: science and advances in medicine; human stories of suffering and triumph (and occasionally the opposite); and then the political – were the budgets adequate, were there enough medical personnel, and so forth.

So I leapt on this book with enthusiasm. The plagues listed are cholera, human trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness, Spanish flu, HIV/Aids, Ebola and Covid.

But the book is less of an exploration of various waves of disease that have swept the world and more a musing on how they – and the policies used to fight them – have affected black bodies.

The book’s subtitle sums up the contents, with captivity taking various forms, such as slavery in the plantations of America’s south – where cholera was a recurring problem – as well as quarantine and lockdowns.

Edna Bonhomme, who grew up in Miami, is of Haitian descent, and describes her indignation as a young woman when HIV/Aids was first identified in 1982. The authoritative US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed four supposed groups as a “high risk” for contracting or transmitting the syndrome: homosexuals, heroin users, haemophiliacs and Haitians.

She writes: “Haitians were the only members of the ‘4H club’ included on the basis of their nationality. As a consequence they and their US-born children were denied housing and employment. Working class Haitians found themselves marginalised four times over: They were Black…; they were poor; they were migrants; they were marked out as diseased.”

A page or two later she writes: “Yet we Haitians were hardly the first groups of people to be blamed or stigmatised over an epidemic. This book is a journey towards understanding how disease management is influenced by how society defines humanity.”

I think this book, while offering some profound truths, will not be an easy read.