Title: Tooth and Nailed
Author: Sarah Lotz
ISBN: 9780143026341
Publisher: Penguin
Tooth and Nailed, the follow-up to Sarah Lotz’s well-received Exhibit A, arrives on our bookshelves in an incredibly rich season for lovers of local and crime fiction, a period that has offered discerning readers original, insightful and often brilliant works such as Antony Altbeker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree, Deon Meyer’s Thirteen Hours, Chris Marnewick’s The Soldier Who Said No, Mike Nicol’s Killer Country and Margie Orford’s Daddy’s Girl, to mention but a few. To be mentioned in the same breath as these strong works is not only a great compliment to Lotz but one that is fully deserved, as Tooth and Nailed impressively blends terrific humour, a fast-moving yet never convoluted plot and a cast of highly memorable characters into a finely-honed and engaging comic-thriller.
Tooth and Nailed can be read as a kind of sequel to 2009’s Exhibit A, where readers were introduced to the exploits of local Cape Town lawyer Georgie Allen, his brilliant, irascible associate Patrick McLennan (otherwise known as the Poison Dwarf, for both his diminutive stature and his unrelenting acerbic wit), the Witch, his ice-queen former lover, and the scruffy yet lovable mongrel dog Exhibit A, who becomes an integral part of Georgie’s heady life. We pick up with Georgie and Patrick in Tooth and Nailed where the pair are confronted by three rather large headaches: not only must they uncover the truth as to an apparent suicide that haunts the past of a licentious professor who had a relationship with one of his students, but the duo must settle the country’s first gay divorce with the help of a newly appointed and ridiculously fit and dapper whiz-kid, Shane, who seems to be putting a spanner in the works regarding Georgie’s potential office romance with the gorgeous clerk Carmen.
The biggest problem, however, is undoubtedly the lawsuit brought against Georgie’s game ranger brother, Greg, following the attack on, and subsequent blinding of, a twelve-year-old boy in the Botswanan bush. To make matters worse, Georgie’s flagging health, dwindling fitness levels and ever-increasing bouts of perceived inadequacy threaten to hamper his own attempts to win the affections of Carmen in person, while he stealthily tries to woo her in secret via an online dating service.
If these sketchy plot details leave the impression of a work that is both serious and tongue-in-cheek, episodic yet fully realised, then the reading of this fine novel reveals its charm and eclecticism all the more. The novel is divided into four highly amusing and self-reflexive sections – “Ways of Lying”, “In Disgrace”, “Braai the Beloved Country”, and “The Long Talk to Freedom” – that playfully trace celebrated landmarks of South African fiction by Mda, Coetzee, Paton and ex-president Nelson Mandela. These four sections offer a distinctly familiar and intimate first-person kind of storytelling – anecdotal, clever, and endlessly enjoyable – that all the same never trivialises or diminishes the need for fiction to provide a form of immersive escape. Lotz’s novel, humorous as it often is, commendably also does not denigrate the desire for a greater understanding of a country increasingly in search of heroes, however flawed and resolutely human the need for those heroes might be.
Thus, for those in search of a mightily entertaining work of fiction that tickles and stimulates in equal measure, a thriller with a brain and a heart of gold, Sarah Lotz’s Tooth and Nailed is recommended unreservedly.