All Come to Dust 'is way above five stars'

To simply describe this beautifully written, densely textured, novel as a murder mystery would be an egregious understatement. To describe it as a police procedural, or a maverick cop, or a psychological thriller – for it is all of these – would similarly undersell it. To set the scene, the story centres around Edmund Dube, a black Zimbabwean, at two specific points in his life. In 1979, aged seven (the Jesuitical age when personality is formed), he is almost the only non-white pupil at a prestigious school in Bulawayo, Rhodesia. His access to the school had been facilitated by Chief Inspector McDougal, for whom Edmund’s mother worked as a maid. Now, in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, he is Detective Chief Inspector Edmund Dube. The cultural shifts evidenced in that name change underpin this book but are subliminal not overt. The reader doesn’t need to know the history because the writing provides the ambience.

When a woman is reported as murdered, Edmund rushes off to investigate and quickly establishes that the paperknife buried in the centre of her chest is not the murder weapon, because she was dead before she was stabbed. The deceased is a white woman, Marcia Pullman, part of the dwindling number of such individuals, rich, influential, a pillar of society and detested by almost everyone. Her husband is a beefy, obnoxious, functioning alcoholic who, on the face of it, runs a safari company. Both of these sound like stereotypes, caricatures, but in this writer’s hands they are neither. Edmund begins an investigation but is swiftly removed from the case (if a natural death embellished with a dagger actually constitutes a case) and side-lined, ridiculed. Clearly the Pullmans have enormous influence within this kleptocracy. Edmund, and an unlikely (indeed random) assistant, must try to resolve if there is a murder; if so who is the murderer; what illegal activities surround the Pullmans' apparent control of the local powers-that-be? And what connection, if any, is there with his childhood?

The quality of the writing, the skilful use of metaphor, the sense of place, the depth of the characterisation, the intricacy of the plot, combine to produce a singular work. This book is way above five stars.

 from Denis Wheller, Goodreads