As a child, Ali Neuman ran away from home to escape the Inkatha, a militant political party at war with the then-underground African National Congress. He and his mother are the only members of his family that survived the carnage of those years and the psychological scars remain.

Today, Neuman is chief of the homicide branch of the Cape Town police, a job in which he must do battle with South Africa’s two scourges: widespread violence and AIDS. When the mutilated corpse of a young white woman is found in the city’s botanical gardens, Neuman’s job gets even more difficult. He is chasing one false lead after another when a second corpse, again that of a white woman, is found. This time, the body bears signs of a Zulu ritual. A new evil has insinuated itself into this recently integrated city. And a new drug: traces of an unknown narcotic have been found in the blood of both victims. The investigation will take Neuman back to his homeland, where he will discover that the once bloody killing fields have become the ideal no-man’s land for unscrupulous multinationals, and that the apparatchiks of apartheid still lurk in the shadows and the back rooms of a society struggling toward reconciliation.

Caryl Férey
Caryl Férey’s novel Utu won the Sang d’Encre, Michael Lebrun, and SNCF Crime Fiction Prizes. Zulu, his first novel to be published in English, was the winner of the Nouvel Obs Crime Fiction and Quais du Polar Readers Prizes. In 2008, it was awarded the French Grand Prix for Best Crime Novel. He lives in France.

• Jun 15 2015
  Director Jerome Salle’s film City of Violence based on ZULU is among 6 films nominated to compete in the 2015 Zanzibar International Film Festival.
  
• May 3 2015
  Mrs. Peabody Investigates: "Zulu, the winner of the French Grand Prix for Best Crime Novel of 2008, is a highly absorbing read"
  
• May 10 2010
  Mostly Fiction: "Férey’s nightmarish vision of South African crime creates a whole new kind of hell."
  
• May 5 2010
  Reviews by Mary Whipple: "The action moves at warp speed."
  
• Apr 6 2010
  Kirkus Review: "A horrifying, eye-opening thriller."
  
• Mar 22 2010
  Publishers Weekly: "Powerful and unflinching in its portrayal of evil both mindless and calculating."