Shadow Country — Craig Higginson

In the heart of Zululand, the mystery of a missing young woman is lost in the shadow of iSandlwana, the lion shaped mountain that looms over the residence of the valley captured in the vortex of past legends rising from the piled rock monuments guarding the bones of Zulu and British Soldiers killed in the colonial war.  When the body of a young woman, presumed to be the beautiful Sam Webster, appears briefly on the banks of the flooded Buffalo River, the writer Daniel Hawthorne decides to visit the Websters’ luxury lodge perched at the edge of an old battlefield. Under the guise of researching a new novel about his disgraced ancestor, the lepidopterist Lieutenant Charles Hawthorne, who fought in the Battle of iSandlwana, Daniel starts to investigate the reasons for Sam’s disappearance. The lines between loyalty and betrayal, love and hate, cowardice and courage, redemption and shame, soon become blurred as Daniel gets closer to the truth.  Written in Craig Higginson’s masterful prose, Shadow Country is at once a war novel, a murder mystery, a multi-layered love story and a robust reassertion of what it is to remain human during the most challenging times.