PRESENT TENSE
Present Tense, the first Schalk Lourens mystery, will be re-released on
3 December 2024.
Winner – Ned Kelly Award, debut novel
Shortlisted – Davitt Award
Voted one of the best reads of 2020, The Australian
Who can you trust in a country where everything is up for grabs?
Retired police chief Piet Pieterse has been ‘necklaced’. A tyre was placed round his neck, doused with petrol, set alight. It’s an execution from the apartheid era, and one generally confined to collaborators. So who would target Pieterse this way and why now, twenty-five years after apartheid ended?
Veteran cop Schalk Lourens is trying to forget the past. But Pieterse was his old boss, and Schalk finds the past has a way of infecting the present.
Meanwhile, it’s an election year. People are pinning their hopes on charismatic candidate Gideon Radebe, but there’s opposition and in this volatile country, unrest is never far from the surface.
Schalk must tread a difficult path between the new regime and the old, between the personal and the professional, between justice and revenge.
The investigation will change his life, and could alter his country’s future.
WHAT IF JUSTICE ISN'T ENOUGH?
Schalk Lourens got out his phone and started filming, something Pieterse taught him years ago. Keep a record. Do it yourself, boykie, every time. That way you can be sure. Cover your arse, boet. Don’t trust any of them. Schalk began with Pieterse himself, Piet Pieterse, what was left of him...
PRESENT TENSE
Read the first 10 pages
Praise for Present Tense
A lean and thrilling crime story set in the ‘new South Africa’. In prose both clean and sharp, Natalie Conyer draws the reader into a gripping story of murder, revenge and betrayal.
This superbly structured novel with its cast of engaging characters is among other things an almost incidental masterclass in the realities of life in South Africa.
A truly remarkable book. South Africa comes to vivid life in these pages.
WHAT IF JUSTICE ISN'T ENOUGH?
Schalk Lourens got out his phone and started filming, something Pieterse taught him years ago. Keep a record. Do it yourself, boykie, every time. That way you can be sure. Cover your arse, boet. Don’t trust any of them. Schalk began with Pieterse himself, Piet Pieterse, what was left of him...
PRESENT TENSE
Read the first 10 pages
Present Tense in South Africa
WHERE TO BUY
In South Africa, Present Tense is published by Penguin Random House and is available from most good bookshops.