‘How do you force a red-hot coal into a person’s mouth? Suddenly, Jade knew the answer. You push it in when he screams.”
Jade de Jong, a bodyguard and policeman’s daughter, finds herself catapulted headlong into the most complex case she has ever encountered.
What at first seems to be another simple case of seedy husbands and hysterical wives rapidly reveals itself to be a catalogue of the cruellest of crimes.
On a grey night in London a team of Scotland Yard police raid an illegal brothel and discover trafficked victims originating from Senegal and South Africa.
In Johannesburg, Pamela Jordaan employs Jade after her husband, the owner of a string of strip clubs, vanishes; and in Jade’s own mind, there rages a war between personal loyalties.
Despite tagging Pamela as a low-risk time-waster, Jade soon finds her decision overturned when their first short journey together ends in a high-speed car chase and narrow escape from a supposed hit man on a motorbike.
The events that follow only deepen her suspicions that not all is as it seems.
It seems that Pamela’s entire life has been spent surrounded by the seediness of the adult entertainment industry; even her daughter, Tamsin, is part of the family business.
To complicate things further, Tamsin herself disappears without a trace, leaving Jade to sift through too many half-truths to count.
Meanwhile, David Patel – a former lover of Jade, husband of Naisha and father of Kevin – is called upon by his English counterparts to investigate the whereabouts of suspects who fled from the scene of one illegal brothel in London.
Coming up against some of the slimiest characters of his career, including a human trafficker with a taste for torture by fire, David soon finds his own family threatened.
His is not the only one, however, as a deceptively frail-looking foreigner makes his way around Johannesburg, leaving a trail of blood and fear in his wake.
Stolen Lives is, without a doubt, thrilling enough to capture a reader.
Despite the somewhat two-dimensional characters and unoriginal tone, it carries itself along quite steadily with a solid, well-considered plot and enough blood and gore to satisfy the more violent imagination.
It tackles complex issues such as human trafficking, rape and torture in a somewhat formulaic manner, yet with the delicacy and gravity they demand.
The one odd stylistic idiosyncrasy is the tendency of the author to include a racial “tag” with the introduction of each new character – black, white, coloured or Indian.
Whatever the reason, it is both annoying and unnecessary – and does not only leave one feeling slightly wearier of South Africa’s slightly race-obsessed society, but also insulted that the author should feel the need to point out three times on one page that a particular character is a particular hue.
After all, unless the vast majority of people suffer from chronic short-term memory loss, such repetitive descriptions are a blight on an otherwise well-written passage.
Despite this, Stolen Lives does not fail to entertain.
The alternating between chapters from one storyline to another keeps the narrative fresh, although on occasion it might have been more effective to refrain from revealing the perspective of certain characters – perhaps to enhance the aura of mystery surrounding them.
While the pace may seem a bit pedestrian at first, it soon heats up considerably – and continues to do so until the revealing climax.
This novel is certainly a thriller worth reading.