South African author Deon Meyer’s Benny Griessel series is one of the high points of contemporary crime fiction, and the fifth title, Icarus (translated from Afrikaans by KL Seegers, Hodder & Stoughton, £17.99), is his best yet. Detective Captain Griessel of the Cape Town police is a recovering alcoholic whose sobriety is derailed by the news that a colleague killed his family and then himself. Potentially career-destroying benders and attempts to get back on the wagon punctuate his investigation into the strangling of Ernst Richter, owner of the adultery-facilitating website Alibi. It soon becomes clear that Richter, who wasn’t averse to a spot of blackmail, has not honoured his promise of client confidentiality, and an anonymous Twitter user threatening to reveal the cheaters’ names causes a media frenzy. There’s a parallel narrative involving the troubled family history of winemaker Francois du Toit, but it’s not until the end that the link between these two equally fascinating strands becomes clear in this expertly engineered tales of sex, lies and fraud.
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