... to my blog today. Hello Alex, and thanks for making time in your busy schedule to be here. So what have you got for us?
AM I have an excerpt from The Red Die, my crime fiction thriller set in Mozambique.
CHAPTER 7
When the Comandante arrived at the former comando,
he found Samora moving a desk and two chairs into a room that still had some
roof over it. Two builders were hoisting a few new sheets of zinc onto the
holes in the ceiling while Samora watched closely, his index finger hurriedly
tapping his watch. In no time the zinc plates were in place and Samora and
Felisberto were once again alone.
“Good morning, chefe,”
said Samora, shoving a cup of tea with condensed milk and an egg roll
Felisberto’s way. “I took the liberty of getting the place ready for work,”
added Mossuril’s police deputy. “Mozambique’s greatest detective can’t work
with holes in the roof.”
Felisberto sipped
the tepid tea and looked out through the window onto the bay. A group of local
women were collecting crabs on the beach. Further out, two passenger dhows
crossed each other in the bay halfway between Lumbo and Mossuril. Felisberto
had read that the Aga Khan, the influential religious leader and
philanthropist, had honeymooned with a famous US actress called Rita Hayworth
at the Hotel de Lumbo in the 1940s. The
Comandante imagined the two rich and successful VIPs sailing in the same
bay over sixty years before. Mozambique had since fought a war of independence
with Portugal, its former coloniser. The country had then endured another
sixteen years of war to safeguard that independence from foreign interests. Now
the Hotel de Lumbo, once the haunt of global celebrities, was a complex of
ruins slowly being returned to nature with the assistance of termites, rain and
wind. Its only remaining seasonal guests were the swallows that weaved in and
out of the fallen rafters.
A brown eagle glided
in and out of Felisberto’s viewfinder and the Comandante followed it as it flew
towards Ilha de Moçambique, the country’s former capital. Felisberto sipped
his tea and looked across the bay in the other direction towards Quissanga.
Nothing he did, it seemed, could escape the spell of Stokes’ death and the
trails it had left. The sight of two children playing with dice refocused the
Comandante.
about the book... The body of a man with a red die in his pocket is washed ashore near a quiet village on the coast of the Indian Ocean in southern Africa. But what looked initially like a corpse that came in with the tide soon turns out to be a murder case that will lead Comandante Felisberto and his team to the edge of danger and despair as they uncover a trail leading up to the highest echelons of power in their country.
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