Close Call

Kate Baeier #5

by Gillian Slovo

Five months since her return from an exciting five-year stint as a war reporter, Kate Baeier is back in London and starting to feel less than challenged by the series of somewhat tame profiles she is working on. Then she is asked to investigate a rape that happened at the police station.

Genres: Fiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Novelist Gillian Slovo was born in 1952 in South Africa, the daughter of Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist party, and Ruth First, a journalist who was murdered in 1982.

Gillian Slovo has lived in England since 1964, working as a writer, journalist and film producer. Her first novel, Morbid Symptoms (1984), began a series of crime fiction featuring female detective Kate Baeier. Other novels in the series include Death by Analysis (1986), Death Comes Staccato (1987), Catnap (1994) and Close Call (1995). Her other novels include Ties of Blood (1989), The Betrayal (1991) and Red Dust (2000), a courtroom drama set in contemporary South Africa, which explores the effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Reviews

[Wayne Jordaan · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first read from the pen of Gillian Slovo was not love at first sight. It took me a while to get into this story, and I eventually concluded that it would have been a lot better if I read this book in order. This being the fourth adventure of Kate Baier. Towards the end though we have managed to find each other, and I will definitely go back for more. My recommendation to other readers? Go for it, but try and read the series in order if you can.

[Dennis Fischman · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an entry in the mystery genre, I think this last book in the Kate Baeier series is the strongest. Author Gillian Slovo has mastered the tricks of the trade, with a complicated plot that involves a past death (and coverup), false identities, crooked cops, and an attempt to frame our hero herself for criminal activity. The pacing is good, and the solution is satisfying.

But I read this book in a different way, too: as an installment in the life of one fictional character, Kate Baeier, and in the life of one real person: Gillian Slovo.

Over the course of the series, Kate moves from far-left political activism and journalism, to detective work, to being a war correspondent and back to being an investigator again, and while the earlier books accurately portray 1980's radicals, the later books tell us more about herself. Her relationships with the continuing characters (Anna, Daniel, and especially Carmen) grow deeper--as does her understanding of herself (and not mainly from the psychoanalysis she goes through in book two). In the earlier books, she is in a committed relationship with Sam, and after his death she realizes that she never truly committed and never completely understood the man she thought of as the love of her life. Here, she is beginning to think she could love a man again. Finally, we heard only hints of her tangled history with her father, a Portuguese general, up until this installment. Untying that tangle is key to her healing and growth.

I suspect Gillian Slovo was finding her feet as an author with the earlier books in this series. They reveal a lot about the intersection of radical politics and psychotherapy in the 1980's, and they tackle important issues about white women and women of color, but they are not skillfully plotted or all that well written, only tolerable because of the content. Over the decade of the Kate Baier series' publication, Slovo put out a powerful intergenerational novel, TIES OF BLOOD, featuring a white Jewish South African family like her family of origin intertwined with Black anti-apartheid activists. Her writing took a quantum leap with that one: see my review here. And since leaving Kate Baeier behind, Slovo has published more fiction and nonfiction where the personal and the political meet.

There's a reason, I think, that it's hard to find most of this series in the public library. The demand for it is probably strongest among people of my age and politics who read murder mysteries, a tightly defined group. But if anything I have said about it intrigues you, I urge you to go back to the beginning and give it time to develop.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read