A breathtaking, atmospheric thriller and a stunning return for investigator Dr Clare Hart. The gruesome murder of a homeless teenage boy suggests a methodical serial killer is at work in Walvis Bay, a depressed port, isolated in the vast sweep of the Namib Desert. It is a corrupt, claustrophobic place with a shifting population of people who came here only because they had to and where people know everything - and nothing - about each other.

As part of a cross-border policing initiative, Dr Clare Hart is sent to profile the possible killer. She works with Captain Tamar Damases, an astute local detective, who heads up the coastal town's Sexual Violence and Murder Unit. Clare is glad to be distracted from the implosion of what was till a few days ago a blossoming love affair with Captain Riedwaan Faizal, who turned out to be more married than she thought.... As the two women trace older crimes that may be related to the recent killings, nothing is as it seemed at first. And as Riedwaan comes to join Clare, to help with the investigation and to try to salvage their relationship, she realises that the harbour holds more than just rusting Russian fishing trawlers, and that a deadly cargo is ready to sail. It's not just their relationship that is in danger, their very lives - and the lives of others - are at stake....

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margie Orford is an award-winning journalist, photographer, film director, author and Fulbright scholar. Previous projects include Women Writing Africa, Fabulously 40 and Beyond: Women Coming into their Own and Fifteen Men: Words and Images from Behind Bars (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2008). Daddy’s Girl is the third title in her Clare Hart series, and follows Like Clockwork and Blood Rose.

R130.00 • ISBN: 978-1-86842-348-4 • Aug 2009 • B-format Pb 127mmx192mm South African rights • Category: Crime fiction

Sharply intelligent and beautiful, investigative journalist turned profiler Dr Clare Hart has a reputation: she can see into the darkest places of the violent criminal mind.
Riedwaan Faizal is a member of the South African Police’s elite Gang Unit. Tough and streetwise, he is used to being a target. But when the danger of his one-man anti-gang war envelopes his only daughter, and he becomes the prime suspect in her abduction, there is little he can do.

Distraught, Faizal turns to a sceptical Clare Hart for help. Their desperate search for the missing child, whose chances of survival diminish with each hour, unravels a tangled web of deception and danger that puts all their lives at terrible risk.

Dr Clare Hart is back … Orford’s chilling prequel to Like Clockwork raises the stakes and the suspense to gripping new levels.

‘I couldn’t put it down, I read it in one day.’
- Jenny Crwys Williams, Jenny’s Book Show, Radio 702

Friday evening. A deserted street below Table Mountain. A six-year-old ballerina waits alone for her mother to fetch her …

Riedwaan paused at the map, tracing the lines back to the evidence summaries that Clare Hart had made for each of the little girls. The abbreviated lives, the sparse detail. Name, date of birth, date and cause of death.
Yasmin there too. Not yet marked as dead.
‘It’s been more than seventy-two hours. If she wasn’t mine, I’d recognize this for what it is,’ he said. ‘A murder investigation.’

Captain Riedwaan Faizal is a member of the Cape Town’s elite Gang Unit. Tough ansd streetwise, he is used to being a target. But when the danger of his anti-gang war envelops his only daughter and he becomes the prime suspect in her abduction, there is little he can do. He turns to Dr Clare Hart, investigative journalist turned profiler.

Their desperate search for the missing child, whose chances of survival diminish with each hour, unravels a web of deception and danger that puts all their lives at terrible risk.

Margie Orford, an award-winning journalist and internationally acclaimed writer, is the author of the Clare Hart series. Her first two novels, Like Clockwork and Blood Rose have been translated into more than eight languages.

For more information visit her website: www.margieorford.com

Praise for Daddy’s Girl

‘Superlative…One of the most chilling books on crime that I have ever read…I found this book absolutely terrifying…Cracking entertainment – a knockout.’
- Jenny Crwys Williams, Jenny’s Book Show, Radio 702

‘Smart, sassy and, dare one say it, sexy – Margie Orford’s latest offering in the Clare Hart series, Daddy’s Girl, is all of these things and more…’
- Jennifer Crocker, Cape Times

'Margie Orford is guilty of writing a very, very good thriller. Sophisticated plotting, great characters, raw emotions, a satisfying resolution, respectful of, but not slavish to, the genre.'
- John Maytham, Cape Talk radio host and critic

'A perfectly paced plot…Orford's books often have the knack of being impossible to let go of.'
- Natalie Bosman, The Citizen

'Margie Orford, queen of South African crime thrillers, has cracked it. Her third book in the Clare Hart series, Daddy's Girl, has delivered the "ball-crushing fear" she aims for...'
- Sue Grant-Marshall, The Weekender

'Margie Orford is to Cape Town what Val McDermid is to the north of England, capturing the seamier side of the Mother City: drugs, prostitution, gangs, police corruption and the clash between policing and political correctness…Thriller fans will be delighted by this, the latest Clare Hart novel. But, as I said before, the Cape tourist industry, and sections of the South African police, I suspect, will not.'
-- Anthony Egan, Mail and Guardian

R130.00 • ISBN: 978-1-86842-386-6 • August 2010 • B-format paperback Southern African rights • Category: Crime fiction

“When I first arrived at Groot Drakenstein Prison I saw fifteen prisoners, reduced to a brutal sameness by the orange or the blue uniforms, by the obedient way in which incarcerated men shuffled from one place to another at the order of a guard, by my own fear of them.

Nine months later, I have piles of handwritten stories and poetry on my desk. The paper carries with it the unique smell of the prison: a dusty grey hopelessness of lives turned to ash. It turns the stomach. And yet the writing speaks to me of a quiet heroism. These fifteen men turned up at the page, so to speak, every day. They resisted the inertia that creeps into the bones and turns one’s knees to water when one thinks of twenty-five, thirty years in the same small scrap of space and wrote. That slow, carefully accumulated effort has produced this book.

Writing demands that one go to the dark places of the mind and face them. The writing in this collection speaks of the places and experiences rarely glimpsed, rarely represented in our fractured and violent society. Evident in many of the pieces is a reaching back for lost goodness and terrible grief for that lost self, for that other life not lived.”

Sales Price R125
ISBN 978-1-86842-322-4
May 2008
A5 landscape
112pp
World rights
Category: Non-fiction

Jonathan Ball Publishers is proud to announce that Margie Orford’s southern African thriller series has a new home. Like Clockwork, Dr Clare Hart’s riveting debut, will be re-released in B-format in 2009.

When a beautiful young woman is found murdered on Cape Town’s Seapoint promenade, police profiler Dr Clare hart is drawn into the web of a brutal serial killer. As more bodies are discovered, Clare is forced to revisit memories of the horrific rape of her twin sister and the gang ties that bind Cape Town’s crime rings. Are her investigations into human trafficking really linked to the murders or is the killer just playing sick games with her?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margie Orford is an award-winning journalist, photographer, film director, author and Fulbright scholar. Previous projects include Women Writing Africa, Fabulously 40 and Beyond: Women Coming into their Own and Fifteen Men: Words and Images from Behind Bars (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2008). Daddy’s Girl is the third title in her Clare Hart series, and follows Like Clockwork and Blood Rose.

“We’re hooked — tens of thousands of readers in SA and Europe are circling like sharks for another tasty morsel from Orford.”The Weekender

‘Margie Orford is a name you should commit to memory… Dr Clare Hart is set to become as popular as Patricia Cornwell’s forensic investigator Kay Scarpetta and Kathy Reich’s forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.’O: The Oprah Magazine on Like Clockwork

R120.00 • ISBN: 978-1-86842-327-9 • Sept 2009 • B-format PB • 260 pages South African rights • Category: Crime fiction