Pale Horses
Jassy Mackenzie
Publisher: Umuzi
ISBN: 9781415201640
Buy Pale Horses at Kalahari.com
Almost a year after publishing her fourth crime novel, Worst Case, Jassy Mackenzie returns with Pale Horses. After exploring the connections between organised crime syndicates and environmental sabotage and destruction, Mackenzie turns her focus to other, equally pressing, matters: land ownership and food security in South Africa.
In this topical addition to the year’s crime fiction staple the novel’s convoluted plot plays out as follows: as she base-jumps from a Sandton skyscraper, activist Sonet Meintjies, who was involved with an NGO resettling land claimants before her death, is killed by a sabotaged parachute. Her jumping partner, Victor Theron, is adamant that Meintjies’s death is no accident, and he contacts Mackenzie’s heroine, Private Investigator Jade De Jong, who is still smarting from her break-up with police Superintendent David Patel. De Jong soon discovers the deceased’s campaign to protect the rights of an impoverished community seemingly wiped off the face of the earth, their crops and houses razed to the ground.
Pale Horses really starts to hit its stride when De Jong visits the devastation of the “scene of the crime”, only to find that the missing community lived on land expropriated from a white farmer. He also happens to be Meintjies’s vengeful ex-husband and a potential white supremacist no less. Word gets out of a single surviving mother and child on the run, and De Jong learns that Sonet’s journalist sister is also missing. De Jong enlists her ex-lover Patel in her quest to find the mother and child and to uncover the truth of what really happened, and the pair make their way to the Karoo farm of the Meintjies brother Koenraad, introduced in the foreboding prologue. It is here, near Beaufort West, that De Jong and Patel must once again prevent upheaval and misfortune and come to terms with crimes both recent and historical.
The “pale horses” of the title are a Biblical reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that appear in the Book of Revelation ch 6 v 8 as harbingers of the Last Judgement:
I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.
Whereas De Jong and Patel had to race against time to stop a potential environmental disaster in Worst Case, the kind of irreparable environmental damage caused by the genetic modification of crops by large corporations has already taken its toll in Pale Horses. As issues of food security, the safety of farmers and land ownership continue to hog the headlines here and abroad, Pale Horses layers various kinds of “buried truth”. These concealed crimes involve the systemic abuse, dispossession and possibly murder of persons laying claim to a part of the earth as their own.
With poverty, death, famine and (possible) plague in our epoch of global warming, and scientific/genetic experimentation certainly no stretch to the imagination, Mackenzie’s well-researched, involving social commentary reveals the staggering cost of corporate malfeasance in spheres of interest that affect us all.
With substantial time and space devoted to the inner workings of the stock market and futures trading in the Johannesburg CBD – which acts as a striking counterbalance to the scenes set in the rural Karoo – references to the Four Horsemen are judiciously inserted in the novel at key moments. This decision heightens their referential resonance rather than becoming a prosaic symbol of global uncertainty and fear.
If the “Big Issue” nature of the plot tends to go into occasional “preach mode”, Mackenzie builds the tension slowly but surely, plunging her heroine into situations that explode a rigid moral compass. This works well, and serves to flesh out De Jong as a humane, compromised crime fighter.
Accordingly, Pale Horses handles the ever central relationship dynamics between De Jong and Patel with aplomb, with plenty of fireworks and some unexpected revelations setting up their uncertain future together.
For someone following the genre’s local mutation, Pale Horses is reassuringly mature, stimulating genre-fiction. It has enough brio and bite to satisfy fans of local crime fiction without resorting to any instances of gratuitous violence, and you will not find racy sex scenes for the sake of sensation or excessive foul language for the sake of supposed toughness or grit. Rather, Pale Horses eschews banality, and is all the better for it, as it gallops toward a powerful finish. Overall, it is a thoroughly pedigreed effort from Mackenzie.
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