Malla Nunn returns to 1950s South Africa in her third novel featuring Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper, following 2010's Let the Dead Lie and 2009's A Beautiful Place to Die. Blessed Are the Dead opens with the discovery of Amahle, a beautiful young Zulu girl, whose body is left covered in wildflowers on a hillside in the Drakensberg Mountains. The investigation into her death takes Cooper and his associate Constable Shabalala from the compound of a self-absorbed Zulu chief to the estate of a wealthy and socially entitled white family. Cooper must overcome criminal negligence from the corrupt local police force and violent racism from just about everyone else to bring Amahle's murderer to justice.
Nunn writes beautifully, with evocative, almost cinematic, descriptions of the landscape and of Cooper's tumultuous past. As a mixed-race detective in apartheid South Africa, Cooper occupies a difficult position, and the novel is enriched by his struggle with this fact. The nuanced relationship between Cooper and Shabalala simultaneously illustrates all of the worst facets of apartheid and celebrates the strength of character that allows Nunn's hero to disregard society's politics and live by his own code of black and white. Nunn's sensitivity and insight bring to life a lost world of tense colonialism and tribal conflict, undermined by its own false virtues. Blessed Are the Dead is a worthy companion to Nunn's previous work and will leave fans eager for the next installment. --Judie Evans, librarian