Celebrated as the King of South African crime, Deon Meyer is a world-class writer whose page-turning thrillers probe the social and racial complexities of his native country. In , a famous English mathematician is kidnapped and his two bodyguards are killed at a guest house in the beautiful wine country outside Cape Town. Its clearly a professional hit, and the spent shell cases offer a chilling clue: Each is engraved with the head of a spitting cobra.