Where The Dead Lie (en Inglés) - Pierre Botha

On the farms of the Free State, the dead do not always get justice. Sometimes they do not even get counted.

Willem van Tonder has farmed Nooitgedacht the way his father did, and his father before that. He knows the sounds of the night. He knows when Raka the Boerboel holds a line and does not bark, not because there is nothing there, but because whatever is there is already too close for noise.

He is right to know it.

Where the Dead Lie follows one farming community through the long arc of an attack, from the first warning signs that arrive too quietly to be taken seriously, through the night the fence is cut and the front door breaks, to the aftermath: the docket that goes missing, the evidence that does not survive the week, the response times that cannot bear honest scrutiny.

It is a novel about Pa Koos, who inherits a dead man's boots and understands what that means. About Petro, who moves through the farm at the busiest hour because she knows no one will be watching. About Sipho, who writes down the time the fence was first cut, 05:36, because the time matters now in a way it never did before.

It is about what happens when the pattern is too precise to dismiss and the people in authority have already decided not to see it.

Told with spare, unflinching restraint, Where the Dead Lie is literary fiction set against the disputed reality of rural South Africa. It does not sensationalise. It bears witness.

For readers of Deon Meyer, Dalene Matthee, and Etienne van Heerden.

This is a work of fiction. The patterns it describes are not.