Short description
Jake Tromp's wife has left him. But he still has guns. He makes do, operating as a private eye from a second-floor office, next to a prostitute's parlour. What else is an old-South African soldier to do in the new country?
Long description
Tim Keegan’s novel is an hilarious, fast-moving romp through the Cape Town underworld, in which a range of unlikely characters find themselves caught up in a web of deception and intrigue of their own making. Being a satirical take on the crime detection genre in which nothing is as it seems, it is seldom clear who are the bad and who the good guys.
Jake Tromp is a former soldier, heavy drinker, gun dealer and private eye who lost his home and his wife. Jake gets hired to recover money from a bogus scheme run by a crooked businessman by kidnapping his daughter. The plan goes wrong from the start when they kidnap the family’s au pair instead. The street-wise au pair – the daughter of a Miami-based casino owner – assumes an active role in her own kidnapping and schemes with Jake to kidnap the businessman’s daughter and rip off her old man at the same time. Her father sends two Cuban-American heavies to Cape Town to track down the kidnapper and, through contacts in the intelligence community, hires the very same Jake Tromp to help out in the search for his daughter. The businessman’s . dubious lawyer gets involved, swiftly followed by an ex-cop, then more police, and with the Cubans on his case as well our friend Jake soon finds that dumb self-confidence isn’t enough to play this game on all sides. The result is a black comedy of double-dealing, false leads, confusion and many unlikely encounters