Mixed Blood

By Roger Smith

Book Overview

An American fugitive hides out in Cape Town--one of the world's most beautiful and violent cities--in this riveting debut thriller in which one man tries to outrun his past.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080508875X
• ISBN13: 9780805088755
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Awesome crime/noir debut.

Mixed blood is just the kind of crime thriller I've been looking for as of late. I was getting more than a little tired of mainstream novelists that feel like they need to live up to the last guy that wrote something in the same genre. Roger Smith doesn't conform to most of the traditional crime trappings. This isn't an episode of CSI or NCIS where every problem is neatly wrapped up and solved when it's all said and done. And I love that. Thank you, Roger Smith. Keep it up and you have a reader for life. Mixed Blood's South African setting is as oppressive as a midsummer's heatstroke. You can almost feel the wind and smell the foreign sweat spilling through the pages. Also a welcomed difference in popular crime novels. The characters are pretty well drawn and the dialogue is pretty spot-on. The atmosphere is dark and hopeless and there's always a sense of suspense and dread. We're never quite sure who is going to do what. Yes, there are some predictable moments but all in all this is an extremely solid outing. I loved every page of it, honestly. Pick this up if you want something a bit darker, a bit original and a bit more like what crime/noir should be.

Starts at a breakneck pace which never slows

I'm not going to write a book report synopsizing the plot on this one as I got around to reading it quite late due to my other review obligations. If you want to know extensive plot details read the other fine Vine reviews. But early into this terrific suspense thriller, one of the best I've read in years, I could not help but be reminded of John Maxwell Coetzee, who also is known for setting some of his novels in and around his native Cape Town. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 which is never going to happen to "Mixed Blood" author Roger Smith. That's OK. There's plenty of prizes for this genre of entertainment fiction, and Smith deserves every applicable one for this stunning, page-burning debut novel. There's a movie here for sure (Smith is a screenwriter himself and I hope this one gets made, especially with the most recent crops of mediocre cinema). The plot is intricate, the characters well-developed and unforgettable, and the street dialogue is, as another reviewer pointed out, worthy of Elmore Leonard. And Smith does stick to Leonard's "Ten Rules of Writing" -- no annoying descriptions of weather conditions here. And as to the major characters, unlike some of the reviewers who found them all despicable, the only one I really hated was the brutal corrupt cop Rudolphus Arnoldus Barnard (nicknamed "Gatsby" for his addiction to that Cape Town fast food pastiche). I'm fence-sitting on Jack Burn's wife Susan. She underwent her share of misery as a result of Jack's gambling losses forcing him to participate in a Milwaukee bank robbery gone bad and causing their exile to Africa and the freakish nightmare that awaits them there. I did find myself rooting for not only Burn but also ex-con Benny Mongrel, whom I found to be a sympathetic character. As it has already been mentioned in the previous posted review, I don't consider this a spoiler -- Smith indeed does leave it open as to whether Burn is killed on the final page. Remember that fateful day in 1891 in "The Final Problem" when Arthur Conan Doyle supposedly killed off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, but left enough loopholes to insure his subsequent reappearance! Although someone has gone so far as to call this the "first in a series" -- someone who obviously has not read the book --the author details state Smith's second novel will be a "stand-alone". So I wouldn't look for Jack Burn in that one. As to his appearance in Smith's future work. we'll have to wait and see.

Brutal, Violent, Fast-Paced and Very Good

Ex-Marine Jack Burn, in debt to some bad guys, is forced to participate in a bank robbery that leaves a man dead and Jack on the run with three million bucks. He's gotta get far away and Cape Town, South Africa is just about as far as you can get. He gets himself a nice place for himself, his pregnant wife and their four-year-old son, but as luck would have it, bad luck in this case, a couple local gang guys pick his place to rob. Jack isn't a pansy and the robbers wind up dead and now Jack has to get rid of the bodies, however Benny Mongrel, a night watchman has seen what he shouldn't have. However, for his own reasons, he just wants to take his dog and walk away. He wants no part of this. Sadly, life seldom works out the way we want and and it doesn't work out the way anybody wants in this book. And now Jack is on the run again and there is a very bad Afrikaner fat pig of a cop (think a 1960s big bellied Mississippi sheriff) on his trail and this monster of a man who claims to love the Lord smells some dollars, three million of `em. This guy's name is Rudi Barnard, but he's not the only cop in the story, there's a good guy Zulu cop named Disaster Zondi who has a score to settle with Barnard. And all of this goes on in with Cape Town as the backdrop. It's been a couple decades since I was last there, but the Cape Town I remember, the European style cafés, the South American style beaches, the ritzy hotels, the nightclubs, there all still there. Cape Town is a place you could spend the rest of your live in and never miss the place you came from. Well, there's the Flats, you maybe wouldn't want to spend your life there, maybe wouldn't even want to go there. And they make up much of the story, this underbelly part of the city that will suck you right into it's squalor. You'll become a resident through these pages and you won't like it. This is a brutal, very violent and very fast-paced book that moves unrelentingly toward a climax where nobody really wins. There are a lot of bodies here, more than your average thriller and you're going to have to look really, really hard to find your typical good guy, but for all your looking you won't find him, he ain't here, but that's okay, you won't miss him.

Excellent Debut Cape Town Thriller!

Mixed Blood by Roger Smith is a thrilling debut novel set in Cape Town, but not the Cape Town that your travel agent tells you about. Much of the story takes place in that city's underbelly - or the Cape Flats - a place that hope seems to have forgotten. Jack Burn, Smith's far-from-perfect protagonist - a Desert Storm veteran with a gambling problem - is a man running from his past. He is a fugitive from American justice, hiding in Cape Town with his young, pregnant wife and toddler son after having been coerced into taking part in a bank heist that leaves a dead cop in its wake. While trying desperately to blend in and not do anything to raise suspicion or curiosity, they find themselves the victims of a home invasion. Jack instinctively does what is necessary to protect his family, then takes it a step further when he decides he doesn't want them subjected to the scrutiny that a home invasion investigation might bring. At this point, I believe the author wants the reader to feel that Jack has gone too far. There are probably plenty of readers, however, who think the vile individuals who invaded Jack's home and laid hands on his pregnant wife got no more than they deserved. The lives of Jack and his family become intertwined with those of a disfigured ex-con working as a security guard next door who happens to witness the home invasion and becomes an unwilling ally, a ruthless and dirty cop who is looking for the two men who pulled off the home invasion, and a detective who is investigating the dirty cop. While there are several subplots, the writing is smooth and fast paced, never bogging down. The ending, although terribly sad, is believable. All in all, Mixed Blood is a page-turning thriller and an admirable first effort. Carol Ann Hopkins 12/11/2008

Cape Town Noir

Jack Burn is on the run since his gambling debts got him involved in a bank job gone wrong, resulting in the death of a cop in Milwaukee. His pregnant wife knew nothing of his nefarious activities, but she took their young son and left their home behind to join him in Cape Town, South Africa, where they live quietly in an affluent suburb. The idyll is shattered one night when a couple of thugs invade their home, and Jack kills them both. He can't afford to involve the police, so he dumps the bodies out on the veld and starts making plans to move on. Things get far more complicated than that, however. A construction site across the street is guarded by Benny Mongrel, a retired gangster and ex-con who decided to go straight, and his aging watchdog, Bessie. Benny's life hasn't improved any since the day he was beaten and left for dead in a garbage dump, and to say he is a hardened man is an understatement. The one thing he ever cared for is old Bessie, so when a fat cop who comes by asking questions about the BMW the thugs left on the street that night hurts her, the cold hatred within Benny awakens. The cop, Rudi Barnard, known as Gatsby around the Cape Flats slums, rules his patch of territory with an iron fist. He's been murdering and terrorizing with impunity for years, but now he's got word that he's being investigated. He knew the thug whose BMW was left outside Jack Burn's house, and something about the American on the hill piques his interest. He hatches a plan involving the thug's drug-addled widow and the mysterious Americans to get a million dollars in his pocket. Disaster Zondi is the investigator from Johannesburg sent to Cape Town to investigate Barnard. Though the fat man manages to slip out of his grasp just when he's got him in his sights, he is always one step behind, thereby drawn into the drama playing out between the crooked cop and the American on the run. The drama unfolds around these four men and a few other colorful characters, moving from person to person as the intrigue builds. Barnard was such a horrible character, part of me was reluctant to keep reading, afraid of what evil he would do, yet at the same time, the storyline was so compelling I could not put the book down. It was anything but predictable as it bounced from the fugitive, the ex-con, the crooked cop, to the cop who was there to bring him down. None of the characters was a particularly "good" person, so I wasn't sure who I should root for, but I did know who I wanted to see go down. One of the most interesting aspects of this novel, however, is its setting. It painted a very vivid picture of the Cape Flats slums, sprawling onto the scrubland north of Cape Town, and populated by a variety of mixed-race poor. Smith's descriptions of Cape Flats make the slums of Los Angeles sound like Disneyland, making it the perfect setting for a novel about violence and murder. If you love good, gripping suspense wrapped in dark, gritty noir in a col