Pale Horses

Book 4 in the PI Jade de Jong thriller series set in South Africa

At first, the case appears to be one of simple misadventure. Sonet Meintjies, a base jumper, falls to her death while attempting to parachute off a newly built sixty-five-story Sandton skyscraper. But Sonet's jumping partner Victor Theron insists that this was no accident, and he hires private investigator Jade de Jong to uncover the truth.

Glad of the distraction from her conflicted and seemingly doomed relationship with police superintendent David Patel, Jade immerses herself in the case. She discovers that Sonet worked for a charity that helped impoverished communities become self-supporting farming units. Sonet's ex-husband, though, has nothing good to say about his wife or the work she has done. He tells Jade that Sonet's efforts were a useless waste of money and that the farming projects were not sustainable.

When Jade travels out to the Siyabonga community's farm in Limpopo, hoping to prove him wrong, she finds it not just abandoned but razed to the ground. Digging deeper for answers about where the residents went and why they left their fertile valley, Jade finds out that one man died from a terminal illness. Then, to her concern, she learns about more sicknesses and more deaths... a fatal but unknown disease that swept through the entire community.

Jade then discovers that Sonet's sister Zelda, a journalist, was investigating this mystery too. Teniel had discovered that one woman and her son had survived the plague and had left the area, and she was doing her best to track that woman down so she could hear her story.

But now Zelda is missing, and Jade will have to race against time in order to find her. A deadly harvest has been gathered in, and the only person who knows the real truth about it has been forced to become collateral in its trade.

Jassy Mackenzie was born in Rhodesia and moved to South Africa when she was eight years old. She is the author of three previous Jade de Jong novels, Random Violence, Stolen Lives, and The Fallen, and she edits and writes for the annual publication Best of South Africa.