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Book Review of Dying to Live (Detective Kubu, Bk 6)

Dying to Live (Detective Kubu, Bk 6)
cyndij avatar reviewed on + 1031 more book reviews


Sixth in the series, okay to start here however. The last one I read in this series also featured a witch doctor and "muti", magical potions of the witch doctor. Some other reivews of this described it as "sunshine noir", a term I found amusing. This book doesn't fit my personal definition of "noir", since the main characters are calm competent people, with good relationships with each other, and doing their best under some constraints. But it's got a lot of darkness that won't be solved with this one case. Poaching, smuggling, corruption, and HIV are all still going to be there at the end. In the first pages I learned the horrifying fact that up until 1936, the South African government issued permits for whites to hunt down and kill the Bushmen people. That's dark. Anyway, a nice solid mystery puzzle with an interesting twist, really liked the methodical detective work by Samantha Kama and Kubu. I felt as though there wasn't quite as much description of the local scenery as I remember in past books, but there is still a lot of local color so you definitely know where the story is placed.