Bundu Reviews

This is the follow-up to No Mercy and once again brings millionaire hostage rescue expert  Jonathan Grave into play.

Grave is looking for two kids who have been kidnapped  by some very unpleasant people who are having their strings pulled by  a high-profile US senator.

A decent paced thriller but not as strong as the first book. Dunno I just found it a little over the top and the body count clocks up which makes it a little unrealistic. But if you are looking for a bit of brain-dead entertainment then this one is not too bad.

Not as good as the first book and rated it a 3 out of 5.

You can buy the book online from retailer Loot for R59 or you can buy from Kalahari.net by clicking here or on the book cover above.

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If you ever want to pass a few hours with a crime thriller then you can’t go too far wrong with a Jack Reacher novel.

The former millitary police (MP) commander who now leads the life of a nomad wandering around the US, with just the shirt on his back, seems to have a nose for trouble.

When the bus he is travelling on is involved in an accident in freezing conditions in South Dakota, he finds himself snowed in and spending a few extra days in a small prison town.

Reacher finds himself being roped in to protect a state witness who is under pressure from a biker / drug gang who are looking to silence her. The problem is that the biker gang has a contact within the police and then hit may very well come from the people tasked with protecting her.

Not a bad read – rated it a 3 out 5 and there is an interesting twist at the end of the book which might just stun Jack Reacher fans…

You can buy the book online from Loot for R224 or you can get it through Kalahari by clicking here or on the book cover above.

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This was the first book by this author and I was quite impressed.

If you like Harlan Coben then I think you will find John Gilstrap very similar kind of read. Maybe less of the witty one-liners but the characters themselves and the story gives you a very similar feel.

 The key character in the Gilstrap novels is a high-tech private security guy by the name of Jonathan Grave. The son of a former mob boss, a highly decorated soldier and now a very wealthy owner of a security firm with connections to the CIA, Grave is the guy you turn to when the situation calls for something a little different.

But Grave operates by his own rules and when a hostage rescue goes wrong and three hostage takers end up dead, local law enforcement wants answers.

While Grave and his people are trying to clean up the mess, they find themselves dragged into a hunt for biological weapons and dealing with increasingly unsavoury people.

Rated the book a 3 and a half out of 5. Nice read, nice pace, maybe a little over the top in places but all in all I enjoyed it.

You can buy the book online from retailer Loot for just R60 (you read right!) or from Kalahari.Net by clicking here or on the book cover above.

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This is probably the best crime thriller I have read this year and the fact that it is written by a South African gives me an absolute kick. We really do produce top quality talent.

For those who don’t know Meyers’ books, many of them centre around detective Benny Griessel, a “dinosaur” of the old South African Police Service (SAPS). He drinks too much, is losing his wife and his finding it increasingly difficult to know where an aging white inspector is supposed to fit in to the new multi-cultural police ranks.

But that doesn’t mean that his years of experience have been forgotten and increasingly he finds himself mentoring up and coming new detectives with a mixture of results.

In “Thirteen Hours” he is stretched to his limits when a young American girl is found in Cape Town with her throat slit. Even more chilling is that video surveillance footage indicates that she was one of two girls being pursued by a group of vicious killers… the question is where is the other girl and why is she afraid to come to the police?

Running in parallel to this story is the curious death of a Afrikaans music promoter where the case just doesn’t add up to the evidence on hand.

The tension that one feels as the story unfolds is intense. Why is this girl running? Is is a drug deal gone bad or is there something more sinister?

With the killers right on her shoulder from the start of the book to the end, it is on a knife-edge and the climax is equally impressive.

Title: Thirteen Hours
Author: Deon Meyer
ISBN: 978-0-340-95359-4

If you are going to buy one crime thriller this year then Meyers’ Thirteen Hours is probably the best you are going to read. We rated a 4 and a half out 5 and would sincerely recommend it for our blog readers!

You can buy the book online in hardcover from Loot for R236 or you can click on the cover and go through to online retailer Kalahari and buy it there.

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My wife and I spent some time this evening trying to work out whether we enjoyed the latest offering from Harlan Coben – Caught.

There is no question it was a page-turner. I started it earlier today after downloading it to my kindle and it was finished by 4pm. I don’t know exactly what it was but this story was more about curiousity than necessarily a cracking plot.

The book starts with local do-gooder Dan Mercer being setup in a sting which would seem to indicate he was having an inappropriate relationship with a 13 year old boy. Mercer’s life is wrecked in a very public and humiliating manner on a sleaze TV show and his world falls apart… especially when it later appears that he may be implicated in other cases.

Read the rest of this entry »

Being interested in financial markets, I have been meaning to read the Barry Sergeant book – Brett Kebble – The Inside Story – for a while now. One of my colleagues gave me a copy and I just finished it this morning.

Have to say it was a bit of a mixed bag and if you have no interest in mining, the Kebbles or stockmarket investing then this book will just be one big question mark for you.

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As a useless piece of trivia before I get into my latest book review, I thought I’d let the Bundublog community know that I actually worked for Wessel Ebersohn at Succeed magazine in Parktown in another lifetime.

If you want a business which embraces entrepreneurship and a team culture then Wessels’ business is it.

Having worked for him before, I was keen to try his book out. If you can support South African authors and entrepreneurs then get out there and do it!

The story revolves around Abigail Bakula, a rising star in the Justice Department in South Africa. She receives a visit from a soldier who she met when she was much younger and had watched her parents brutally murdered. Now the soldier is looking to her for assistance – a number of his colleagues who had been involved in the raid which killed her parents are now being killed.

Over the last few years, on the 22nd of October a soldier dies and there are now just two surviving members… and the second one is locked up in South Africa’s most secure prison.

Tension continues to build as the soldier then goes misssing after coming to Bakula for help and suddenly it is a race against time as the 22nd draws steadily closer.

It really was a nice South African read – you recognised the places, the moods and the mannerisms of the characters. I found there were one or two gaps in the story which I battled to follow but I was speed reading so may have missed something in it.

The “gaps” as I saw them were not that noticeable that they detracted from a very handy crime thriller.

Title:  The October Killings

Author: Wessel Ebersohn

ISBN: 978-1-4152-0074-2

You can buy the book online from retailer Loot for R159 or if you click on the image of the book below you can buy it from Kalahari.Net

Rated the book a 4 out of 5 and would sincerely recommend it for anybody looking to support South African talent!

I’m a big Harlan Coben fan, but this latest read was a bit wishy-washy for my liking.

The story kicks off with long running hero Myron Bolitar disappearing to a tropical island after some rather traumatic events in the previous novel.

He’s called back to reality after his best friend and business partner Esperanza is arrested and charged with murder following the death of one of their clients.

With Esperanza refusing to talk to him it makes Myron’s case that much harder to solve.

And so begins a search through dodgy night clubs, a missing persons case which is nearly 20 years old and an assortment of people who have a grudge against Myron which ends with a couple of intriguing twists in the tail.

My problem with the book is that it lacked the “compact” nature of other Coben books. Particularly the last 30% of the book seemed to drift and wind a bit.

You got the sense that the book was going somewhere and you got the surprises you wanted, but too much introspection and I guess “dawdle” in the latter part of the book.

The wife commented that she was disappointed there were fewer fight / action scenes and maybe that was what was different about this book – too much focus on

Myron trying to understand himself as a person and not enough knuckles being cracked!

Still it was fun enough to keep me as the reader interested and pass the time.

Title: The Final Point
Author: Harlan Coben
ISBN: 978-0-7393-4117-9

Rated the book a 3 out of 5.

You can buy it online from Loot for R140 or click on the book cover below and buy it through online retailer Kalahari.Net

Happy reading!

Now THIS was a cracking little read. I really enjoy the easy reading style of Harlan Coben and this book was no exception… In fact I’d go as far as to say that I reckon this was probably the best of his books which I have read.

The story is a curious mix of characters where the good guys are not quite as good as they seem, while the bad guys are both really bad … but with a soft spot. The problem is you can never quite work out who is where until the end of the book.

In a nutshell the story reads a little something like this:

Eleven years ago, Julie Miller was found brutally strangled in the basement of her house New Jersey. On that day, Will’s brother, Ken Klein, became the subject of an international manhunt accused of the crime. He has not been seen since. Will has tried to get on with his life in the intervening years. He has a beautiful new girlfriend, Sheila, and a job working with the homeless. But when his mother reveals on her deathbed that Ken is still alive, and shortly afterwards Sheila disappears, the cracks start to show in his landscape again. But it is only when he finds that Sheila herself is wanted for a savage double-murder that his life actually starts to fall apart…

This book moves at a really nice pace and keeps you interested the whole way through!

Title: Gone for Good

Author: Harlan Coben

ISBN: 978-1-4091-1708-7 

This is a really cracking little read and we rated it a 4 out of 5.

You can buy this book online from retailer Loot for R92 in paperback.

Well worth it!

This is a cracking little read from Harlan Coben.

If you like fast-paced crime fiction then this will definately tickle your fancy and it has a nifty little twist at the end of the tale!

The story line is good and reads a little something like this:

8 years ago David Beck and his wife were having a romantic getaway at a cabin in the woods when they were brutally assaulted. His wife’s body was discovered a few days after the assault, battered beyond recognition.

Fast forward 8 years and Beck is still battling to get on with his life and it isn’t helped when he receives a link to a street-cam which mysteriously features an image of his presumed dead wife. Suddenly Becks’ life is turned upside down as he begins to investigate the case again. However the deeper he digs the more people wind up dead or threatened.

The book rollicks along at a great pace and I’d finished reading it inside of two days – a real page turner (if you can use that term when you are reading something on the Kindle?)

Title: Tell no one

Author: Harlan Coben

ISBN: 978-0-440-24590-2

This is a cracking little read and I rated it a 4 out of 5 while my wife threw in her 2c and rated it 3 and a half.

You can buy the book online at Loot for R81 as a paperback.  It is definately worth it!