The final third of the book features a healthy dose of race-based violence, as well as (threats of) sexual violence, and if I am going to read about that, I would prefer to read about it in nonfiction.
The down side of this is that racial violence is very, very hard for me to read about in fiction. Malla Nunn is absolutely wonderful at depicting life in a society that not only condones but (openly) institutionalizes racism. The whole: My favorite thing about A Beautiful Place to Die is also my least favorite thing about it. Since the book is really about prejudice, the violence that simmers throughout the book rarely has to do with the murderer’s identity, and nearly always has to do with preserving one idea of what people and society are like and how they are supposed to behave. I got anxious reading the ending of A Beautiful Place to Die, which gets pretty violent. The end (spoilers here, but not spoilers about who did the murder because that is actually the least interesting part of this book and that’s not a criticism): If I had to choose, I’d always go with the I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here today style of ending. From the get-go, it was clear that the book was going to be a nuanced exploration of racial and gender prejudice, and I was excited for it. When Aarti reviewed A Beautiful Place to Die recently, I was excited to read a murder mystery by a non-American-or-British author and set in a non-American-or-British place, and as I’ve said, a murder mystery featuring a male corpse.
I can read about alive ladies doing things that alive people do. I don’t read that many murder mysteries, partly because it always seems to be women getting killed, and I get tired of reading about beautiful lady corpses. This probably happens more often than it seems to me to happen. It’s a murder mystery where the victim is male. The beginning: British police detective Emmanuel Cooper comes to investigate the murder of an Afrikaner police captain in the small town of Jacob’s Rest. Which I guess is what I should have expected from a murder mystery that takes places in a small town in apartheid South Africa.
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