Guest Post: Michael Stanley

Michael Stanley is the pen name of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. The two are both South Africans and retired academics, Michael a mathematician and Stanley an educational psychologist. Michael lives in Knysna on the South African south coast, and Stanley splits his time between Minneapolis, Denmark, and Cape Town. Their award-winning mysteries, featuring Detective Kubu, are set in Botswana. Death of the Mantis was an Edgar finalist and Deadly Harvest an International Thriller Writers award finalist. The seventh Detective Kubu mystery, Facets of Death, will be released early in 2020 by Poisoned Pen Press.

A stand-alone thriller, Shoot the Bastard, will be published in June 2019 by Poisoned Pen Press. Outside North America, Orenda Books published it as Dead of Night.

They’ve written many short stories and have edited an anthology of short stories set in hot places called Sunshine Noir.

Stanley Trollop

Michael Sears

It is all so sad

There are many worlds out there. There’s the one most of the people we know live in. They are born, grow up, go to school and perhaps university. They work, fall in love, have kids, make friends, retire, and die.

Then there is the world of selfishness, where people think only of themselves and their prosperity and well-being without regard for others.

And there are also worlds we know about but don’t want to be part of – the worlds of slavery, child trafficking, murder and torture, robbery, rape and incest, and so on.

Our latest book, a thriller, is about a normal person from the first of these worlds, investigative reporter, Crystal Nguyen from Duluth, Minnesota, who lands up in the intersection of the second and third type of worlds.

The story is called Shoot the Bastards (Poisoned Pen Press), due out in a couple of weeks.

Readers of this blog are likely to be puzzled and appalled by the poaching of rhinos and the smuggling of rhino horns. With only about 25,000 rhinos left and over 1,000 killed each year for their horns, the future of the species is grim.

Why is this happening?

For the simple reason that millions of people in Vietnam and China believe ingesting rhino horn is good for them. Some take it as a medicine, some as an aphrodisiac, while the affluent young snort it like cocaine. In each case it has absolutely no physiological effect. After all, rhino horn is just keratin, the same as your fingernails. These people are selfish and don’t care about being responsible for the extinction of a species.

The demand is so great that the street value of a mature horn is around $400,000, about three times the value of gold.

As you can imagine, this has caught the attention of people from the third of our worlds – the dark world. With that amount of money at stake, those involved in the rhino trade are brutal, letting nothing get between them and their fortunes.

It is into this world that Crystal lands, naïve, with the certainty of the ignorant. A journalist friend has gone missing while on assignment to write an article about rhino poaching for National Geographic. So she goes to South Africa both to try to find him and, if necessary, to finish his story.

She has no idea what she’s getting into. Within a few days of her arrival, she finds herself inadvertently in the middle of the rhino wars, fearful for her own life. She’s been hunting poachers, hunted by their bosses, and arrested in connection with a murder she didn’t commit. Plus, everyone is after a briefcase full of money that she doesn't want, but can't safely get rid of. Worst of all, she doesn’t know who she can trust. It is a truly harrowing experience.

She barely gets out of South Africa alive, then heads to Geneva to interview NGOs involved in saving the rhino population and to Vietnam to interview the gangs involved in the trade. Unfortunately, the issue of the suitcase full of money has preceded her, and once again she finds herself in extreme danger. It takes all her ingenuity to escape.

By the time she returns to Minnesota, Crystal is unsure of what should be done to save the rhino population. She’s gone from certainty to confusion – a confusion that exists in real life.

In South Africa, huge amounts of effort and money are going into protecting rhinos. Guards armed with automatic weapons shoot it out with poachers armed the same way. Every high-tech tool is being tried. Customs officers seize poached horns every day. But the poaching continues and the war to save the species is being lost. The result is that conservationists are being forced into new and potentially undesirable interventions to try to stem the tide.

The title of the book comes from what you hear in South Africa when poachers are caught. “Shoot the bastards!” is the simplistic reaction of many people – simplistic because the motivations of the people who actually kill the rhinos are often born from need rather than greed. Given the poverty and lack of jobs in the region, some people are willing to risk being killed in order to earn some money for their families.

It is all so sad.

www.michaelstanleybooks.com
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@detectivekubu
murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com (daily blog by 10 authors going for nearly 10 years)