Published by Tafelberg.

Tom Eaton is undoubtedly one of South Africa’s most witty and erudite commentators with a brand of humour that manages to be both razor-sharp and wryly tongue-in-cheek at the same time.

His latest collection, still fresh despite being mostly written before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, rails against current political shibboleths to entertaining and pointed effect. As is only to be expected, Eaton pulls no punches as he takes satirical swipes at a number of rather large and obvious targets – the ANC, Eskom, the SABC – but with his slightly skewed, off-centre approach he manages to illuminate this familiar territory with sharp flashes of novel insight..

Of course, no book about South Africa’s recent history would be complete without a dissection of the rotting cadaver of state capture that was the hallmark of Jacob Zuma’s time in office and Eaton duly obliges with a typically excellent, if typically depressing, essay on the man and the damage he inflicted on the country

In places, it is not at all a comfortable read. Eaton has a habit of shredding many of our common self-deceptions and irrational beliefs, as well as the sort of deluded wish-thinking that often characterises public debate. He includes, for example, a very thoughtful and balanced piece on the role of politics in sport in South Africa, arguing that it is naïve to think you can separate the two. In a chapter dealing with another vexed, contentious South Africa issue – the re-imposition of the death penalty – he puts forward a similarly persuasive argument, showing how we often allow our heated feelings on the subject to override common sense.

Eaton does not confine himself just to local matters. Elsewhere, he includes a perceptive essay on what is happening in the United States, a nation which seems to have been dumbed down to the extent where responsible and informed policy has largely ceased to exist under a regime that denies the reality of global warming and which has a president who advocates drinking bleach as a cure for Covid-19..

Eaton’s writing can be pithy. It can also be deadpan. Underpinning it all, though, is a deep vein of seriousness which forces you reconsider and look again at many of your own assumptions about the sort of society we live in. Or, as Eaton himself puts it, the book is “about trying to resist the knee-jerk responses that professional manipulators want us to have…”

Intelligent, well written and extremely funny, Is it Me or is Something Getting Hot in Here? is a terrific compendium of the incompetence and occasionally appalling behaviour of those in whom we have entrusted our vote. It also holds up a not always flattering mirror to ourselves…

Published by Bantam Press

With his blend of sardonic humour and noble integrity, Lee Childs’ laconic hero, Jack Reacher, is one of crime fictions most likeable and engaging characters.

In his latest outing we find him sitting on board a Greyhound bus, heading along the interstate highway, with no particular destination in mind. Across the aisle an old man sits asleep with a fat envelope of money hanging out of his pocket.

Reacher is not the only one who has spotted it. When the old man gets off, at the next stop, he is followed by another passenger with slicked-back, greasy, hair and a goatee beard. Naturally Reacher, his suspicions aroused, decides he better disembark as well, just in case the other guy has bad thoughts on his mind….

He has. Needless to say, by the time Reacher has finished with him he has good reason to regret ever harbouring them. While obviously grateful for Reacher’s intervention the old man is clearly reluctant to explain who the cash is intended for or to let him get further involved in his affairs.

This merely serves to pique Reacher’s interest further. Having insisted on accompanying the old man home, he eventually gets him to admit that he and his similarly elderly wife are the victims of an ugly extortion racket.

For a loner like Reacher who only becomes sociable when he meets good people in a jam, this goes against the grain and he immediately decides that the time has come to mete out his own particular brand of retributive justice against those who are making the old folks life a misery.

It takes Reacher little time to flush out the enemy but he also discovers he is vastly outnumbered. Despite finding himself caught up in the middle of a particularly vicious turf war, however, between two nasty rival gangs – the one Albanian, the other Ukrainian – he never seems to be in danger of losing his head.

Author, Lee Child, is a reliable performer and once again delivers an enjoyably familiar, violent, pacey, caper. The action sequences are handled with his customary elan while, at the same time, he convincingly manages to convey the sleazy, menacing, underbelly of modern city life.