COBRA: DEON MEYER

I am new to Meyer, to his South African crew of detectives, so he's a good find.  Captain Benny Griessell, a recovering alcoholic (surprise), one of the Hawks, a special crime unit in Cape Town, is thrust into what looks like professional hit job, with two corpses with a bullet in their head and a man kidnapped.  It gets worst when the seeming tourist who is kidnapped happens to be a professor in Great Britain, David Adair, an expert on terrorism, who has written an algorithm which gathers information about not only terrorist cells but also their wiring of money through various European banks. The two dead are the bodies of his body guards.  Benny's two sidekicks, at least in this novel, are the skeptical Vaughn Cupido, a colored from Cape Town, and the straight arrow, Zulu, one Miss Mbali Kaleni, an unlikely threesome especially since Bennie was at one time a police officer during Apartheid.  They discover that the assassin is man nicknamed Cobra, an  ex French Foreign Legionnaire from Mozambique.  He has been hired to find the professor who has a new version of the algorithm, even more devastating to terrorists and their banks. The three detectives of then must find the Cobra and end up chasing him through Cape Town, as they fight the bureaucracy and politics of South Africa, yet steadfast in their refusal to bow down to political hire ups.

Meyer seems to have a couple of stories going so we also follow the machinations of a skilled pick pocket, Tyrone Kleinbooi, who uses his skills to put his sister through school.  He gets mixed up in the chase when he picks the wrong pocket, that of David Adair's girl friend, who is bringing the valuable algorithm on memory card to Cape Town to save David's life.  Tyrone ends up playing the cops off against Cobra, saves his sister's life and bargains with Cobra, promising him the card for two million dollars.  The Cobra agrees to the trade, and Benny ends up with the money though he then gets caught by Benny after the Cobra and his fellow assassins have been violently dispatched on a suburban train.  Benny realizes, however, the courage and the street smarts of Tyrone and lets him go, making Tyrone promise to go straight, make sure his sister finishes college and to make his life miserable if he ever gets caught pickpocketing again.

The only problem with the book: Meyer uses quite a bit of Africaan slang which makes it necessary to refer to the glossary of terms at the end of the novel.