The Kramer and Zondi Mysteries by James McClure

Before his death in 2006, crime novelist James McClure wrote eight books in the award-winning Kramer and Zondi mystery series, set in South Africa. Last summer, Soho Press began to reissue the books, long out of print, as trade paperbacks in their original order of publication. This month, the fourth in the series, Snake, is published.

Lieutenant Tromp Kramer of the Trekkersburg Murder and Robbery Squad, an Afrikaner, and his partner Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi, a Bantu, were introduced in 1971 in The Steam Pig, which was honored with the CWA Gold Dagger Award as the best crime novel of the year.

In addition to his series mysteries, McClure wrote several non-fiction books and other novels, including the spy thriller Rogue Eagle, which won the CWA Silver Dagger in 1976.

We are delighted that Soho Press has elected to reissue the Kramer and Zondi mysteries to a new generation of readers. Though it is not necessary by any means to read the series in order — the storylines of each book are self-contained — new readers may still want to start at the beginning with The Steam Pig, in which the detectives investigate the murder of a beautiful blonde, who has been killed by a bicycle spoke to the heart, Bantu gangster style.

In the most recently published book in the series, this month's Snake, Kramer and Zondi have their hands full. On the same day that an adult entertainer known as Eve is found accidentally strangled to death in her dressing room, her pet python wrapped dead around her neck, a beloved candy shop owner named "Lucky" Siyayo is shot to death at his counter in a botched robbery. The detective duo quickly realize neither death is as simple as it looks on the surface: Lucky Siyayo's cash register was all but empty the day he was murdered, which suddenly throws a whole rash of fatal neighborhood robberies into perspective — were none of them robberies at all? It becomes clear a killer is on the loose, but Zondi and Kramer must figure out what the killer is after.