Gebeente

Beneath the Eye, a whining telescope trained on the past, Altydoopvygie raises her restless baby Jisses, who crawls through thornbushes, keeps setting his own head alight and murmurs his first word, a call to his father, up at the stars. When he is three the State takes him from her. Thirty years on he comes back with Wolraad Woltemade, a friend from the orphanage, to Gebeente, his crumbling Karoo birthplace, and his mother drives them off as runaways. Spurned, Jisses starts preaching from the quarry, and his followers fall out with the locals, above all those out to make money from the Moon. After a savage farm killing the town blames the pair for everything from double murder to stealing the Milky Way, and Magistrate Imker Goedeman and a cowboy prosecutor, Div de Villiers, must work out what to charge them with.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

408 pages in the original

Genres

Crime (assigned by AI)

Set in

South Africa

First published

2023 by Tafelberg

Author's age

69 when first published

ISBN

9780624094678 (original)