In 2012 Angy Peter was a community leader and a trusted neighbour, bringing up her three young daughters in a part of the vast township of Mfuleni called Bardale, on the Cape Flats. Angy was an activist for the Social Justice Coalition, the NGO that led the charge for a Commission of Inquiry into the state of policing in Khayelitsha. Angy was vocally against vigilante violence and was the go-to-person in the community demanding better services from the police. But mere weeks before the start of the Commission, she was accused of murdering – necklacing – a young neighbourhood tsotsi, Rowan Du Preez.

The State’s case would centre on the accusation Rowan du Preez allegedly made with his dying breath – that Angy and her boyfriend Isaac Ndlovu set the tyre alight around his neck. In this book, Simone Haysom takes the reader into the heart of a mystery: is Angy Peter being harassed by the police and blamed for a murder she did not commit? Or is she, as the State argued, ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’, who won a young man’s trust then turned against him, in the most brutal way?

Simone Haysom spent four years meticulously researching this case and the result is a court-room drama interwoven with expert opinion and research into crime and the state of policing in the townships of South Africa.