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Two vicious murders, only hours apart.

When two guests—Zimbabwean teacher Goodluck Tinubu and supposed South African tourist Sipho Langa—are bludgeoned to death at the isolated Jackalberry bush camp in northern Botswana, Detective David “Kubu” Bengu arrives from Gaborone to assist the local police.

Ishmael Zondo, another guest at the camp, departed unexpectedly at dawn the morning after the murders. Now Zondo has completely disappeared, and the Zimbabwe police are unable—or unwilling—to trace him. Reports surface that he is wanted as a dissident in Zimbabwe. And, as a final enigma, matching fingerprint records reveal that Goodluck Tinubu was killed in the Rhodesian civil war thirty years earlier.

Then the other guests at the camp start dying one by one. The local police have their own suspicions, but the wily Kubu believes that the obvious is not what it seems. Having discovered that everyone at the Jackalberry camp has something to hide, Kubu sets a clever trap to find the truth.
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Smashed skull, snapped ribs, and a cloying smell of carrion. Leave the body for the hyenas to devour—no body, no case.

But when Kalahari game rangers stumble on a human corpse mid-meal, it turns out the murder wasn’t perfect after all. Enough evidence is left to suggest foul play. Detective David “Kubu” Bengu of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department is assigned to the case.

Kubu’s personality and physique match the moniker. His nickname is Setswana for hippopotamus—a seemingly docile creature, but one of the deadliest on the continent. Beneath Kubu’s pleasant surface lies the same unwavering resolve that makes the hippopotamus so deceptively dangerous. Both will trample everything in their path to reach an objective. And beginning with the suspicious carrion death, the clever detective battles to unravel the tangle of crime and corruption.