The story of the Prison Doctor is inspired by real crime cases in which male long-term prison inmates seek to seduce female prison personnel. In most cases the sex is the minor attraction for them. The real aim is escape. Some have been successful. A few have gotten clear away, but the usual result is a jail sentence for the prison officer.In a widely publicised New York case two male prisoners made promises of a new life on a Mexican beach (a la Shawshank Redemption) to a guard who was unhappy in her marriage. The escape was successful, but in the manhunt that followed one prisoner was killed and the other returned to prison with an increased sentence. The guard got her first taste of life on the other side of the bars.The Prison Doctor begins with Magnuson, a convicted killer on death row, seeing the prison's new doctor as a weakness in the security system. Gillian, the doctor, is a timid and vulnerable woman who has been through two unsuccessful marriages....

When Beloved Childe agrees to help a mother find her missing daughter she does not know what lies ahead and how complex the search will become. The web of lies and homicidal violence she enters only becomes clear when she is called in by government agents. They know of the young woman's disappearance. They also know other things that Beloved has not yet guessed at. It is a shock to discover that the missing girl has joined a cult that its members refer to simply as the Gathering. It is a still greater shock to discover that some of its members have been murdered. Who has killed them? The agents believe that if they can get Beloved on the inside they will find the missing woman and bring down the cult. It soon becomes clear to Beloved that achieving membership of the cult is going to take sexual relations with its leading members. Since her early teenage years she has had a succession of lovers so sex is not a problem, excepting that in this case her...

The South African highveld, 1977"They were coming for him as he had known they would. He could see the headlights on the track far below where the first truck had stopped at the donga and the second truck still struggled up the incline. Behind him was the spur that went all the way to the crest of the hill and, just beyond the crest, the barbed-wire fence. He knew that beyond the fence there was nothing like you had on this side – no hill, no farmlands, no distant plain – nothing at all."Muskiet Lesoro, terrified and schizophrenic, is accused of the murder of the local member of parliament's son. Farmworkers and family all agree that he had enough motive to murder the violent and racist young man. Like the victim, Lesoro also had an undeniable tendency towards violence. Only one matter raises doubt in the mind of eccentric prison psychiatrist Yudel Gordon: this was a poisoning and, in his view, Lesoro was no poisoner. Someone else, someone...

The killings of Ray Baker and Fellows Ngcube, and the attack on Lionel Bensch's home, were only the beginning. Before long there was a steady stream of murders. Activists, trade unionists, lovers of freedom, do-gooders who did not realise how soon they were going to die: all government opponents.When prison psychologist Yudel Gordon is offered a substantial sum to conduct an investigation privately for a group of political activists, he does not agree immediately. To undertake something of this sort is against departmental regulations and could be a firing offence. On the other hand in his view none of the victims of these attacks is guilty of anything more than disagreeing with the way the country is run.The information he receives is vague. Is one group responsible for the killings, or are they unconnected? It is possible that the extreme rightwing Afrikaner Revival Movement is involved. But, more chillingly, could the murderers be found within the country's...

Almost everyone agreed the end of Apartheid was inevitable and necessary. But there were those who felt that they were losing the country they love. Gysbert Moolman, one of them, believed there was no future for him or his children in South Africa under the new ANC government. As a demonstration of his anger and to make clear the hopelessness of his situation he plants plastic explosives in a school hostel. One of the police interrogators, trying to get the truth out of him, gets carried away and Moolman is unconscious after being tortured.Time to save the children is slipping away and Yudel Gordon is called in to revive him. He agrees, but only if he can use his own methods to try to extract the truth from the suspect. "You have half an hour," he is told. Yudel's challenge is to find the hostel, before he blows it up, and so save the children. The case brings back memories of another one thirty years earlier when in that case too the subject was beaten by the police of...

Johannesburg, South Africa, 1974 "From the place where Cissy stood in the shadow of the used­car dealer's sign, watching, she could see the door dearly. She had passed it coming down the road and it had been open then. Through the narrow opening she had been able to see the stack of biscuit boxes that did not seem to have been opened yet. "The cement floor was cold, she heard feet move on the floor. "Come out. I don't want to play games with you. I don't want any trouble." Cissy pushed the boxes away and scrambled out, half-rising, her hands clasped together in an attitude of supplication. "Please, Mister. Please, Mister. Me and my brother are very hungry." Cissy Abrahamse was the eighth person to die in or near the store room of the Twin Sisters café. Most were street children, all were hungry and all yielded to the temptation of the half open store room door. The killer in every case was the aged and partly...

When Abigail Bukula, a young lawyer in the South African Justice Department, learns that the secret son of her aunt, who died in a massacre years ago, has been arrested by the Zimbabwean government, she races to his aid. She’s as determined as ever but perhaps a bit naive as well. Accused of being a part of the so-called Harare Seven, her cousin is being held as a political prisoner in the country’s most brutal prison. With only an eager young lawyer as an ally and a director of the country’s intelligence agency either helping her or setting her up, Bukula will not leave without winning her cousin’s freedom and learning what really happened to her aunt so many years ago. By cunning, by bribery, by sheer audacity—and with the help of her friend prison psychologist Yudel Gordon—Abigail is determined to prevail in Those Who Love Night, Wessel Ebersohn’s explosive follow-up to his critically acclaimed series debut.From BooklistAbigail Bukula, introduced in The October Killings (2011), returns in this intense story that reaches back into Zimbabwe’s violent past. An accomplished lawyer and rising star in the South African Justice Department, Abigail is shocked to learn that she has a cousin, Tony, whom she never knew existed and that he has been imprisoned in Zimbabwe as part of the activist Harare Seven. With the aid of an idealistic lawyer, she determines the best course of action to procure the young activists’ release from one of the government’s most notorious prisons, but government and prison officials claim they are not even holding the group. She is joined in her efforts by brilliant prison psychologist Yudel Gordon and seems to have gained the favor of one of the secret police’s high-level bureaucrats, Jonas Chunga. But what does Chunga really want from her, and why is she so willing to put her marriage vows aside? Like fellow South African Deon Meyer, Ebersohn excels at depicting the treacherous politics of an unstable country, one in which the search for justice is always fraught. --Joanne Wilkinson ReviewPraise for The October Killings“A brilliant novel of memory, reconciliation, and revenge. Ebersohn was always one of South Africa’s best, and this new book—the beginning of, I hope, a series—shows why…. Ebersohn never loses the narrative thread, and there isn’t an extraneous syllable in this tight, intelligent novel that weaves history and politics. Definitely one of the best mysteries of the year.”—The Globe and Mail (Toronto) “His horrors, rooted so closely in history, have a nightmare quality that’s hard to shake.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Deftly mixing past and present in a complex plot that pits justice against moral ambiguity…he vividly portrays a divided nation… .Highly recommended.”—Library Journal (starred review) “South African author Ebersohn kicks off a promising new series... .The complexities of South Africa a decade after the end of white rule help fuel a compelling plot that builds to several dramatic climaxes.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Abigail Bukula was fifteen years old when her parents were killed in a massacre of antiapartheid activists by white apartheid security forces. Because a young soldier spoke up in her defense, she was spared. Now she's a lawyer with a promising career in the new government, and while she has done her best to put the tragedy behind her, she's never forgotten Leon Lourens, the soldier who saved her life. So when he walks into her office almost twenty years later, needing her help, she vows to do whatever she can. Someone is slowly killing off members of the team who raided the house where her parents were murdered, and now Leon and an imprisoned colonel are the only targets left. Abigail turns to Yudel Gordon, an eccentric, nearly retired white prison psychologist for help. To save Leon's life they must untangle the web of politics, identity, and history before the anniversary of the raid—only days away.The October...

What happens to Chris and Ruthie comes naturally to teenagers: they fall in love, obsessively. But it isn't natural that their love can only survive in secrecy, being against the wishes, even beyond the imagination, of their parents. And above all being illegal. At home Chris half loves, half fears his taciturn father, who never speaks of his important work for the Government. As Chris's world opens up he learns about his father's job as head of the province's Race Classification Office, whose every decision can make or break somebody's life in the 1970s South Africa. In this moving rites-of-passage story set in extraordinary circumstances, a coloured girl and white boy head for devastating consequences as their vulnerable lives hurtle down a collision course with the pitiless laws of society and the implacable resolve of his father.

Enslin Kruger is a dying man, but he is the top prisoner in C-Max prison, and must name his successor. This means blood. Kruger sees an unexpected opportunity to achieve this and at the same time exact revenge on his old nemesis, Yudel Gordon. He will anoint as his heir the man who slaughters Gordon's protégé, the beautiful Beloved Childe. A race ensues, by road and rail, from Pretoria to Cape Town ... and by the time Gordon gets a whiff, it is already hopelessly late. To save Beloved, Gordon and his associate Abigail Bukula must figure out what the would-be killers are up to, and quickly.