Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso are back. The two private security specialists based in Cape Town have a new challenge: to stay alive and keep their families safe, while earning a living the only way they know how.
Killer Country is the second instalment in what will ultimately be the Revenge trilogy involving two former Umkhonto we Sizwe operatives-turned-gun runners and now - in democratic South Africa - bodyguards and fixers.
We were introduced to them in Payback, a fast-paced thriller skirting around the arms deal, atmospherically South African and pungently Capetonian.
Killer Country moves the geographic scope a little wider, up to Joburg and lashings of the Karoo, but still essentially Cape Town and unashamedly South African.
Payback was about the arms deal; Killer Country has moved to shady ama-BEE types with nods to the tenderpreneurs who have spent time, post-struggle, in Pollsmoor. At least one of the villains has translocated from the first book to the second, the inimitable Sheemina February, a 21st-century Cruella de Vil with all the repressed sex and none of the Dalmations.
Obed Chocho, the post-apartheid tycoon, is about to get paroled from prison, scaring the judge who put him there, Telman Visser, who promptly calls Bishop and Buso to protect him.
But it's a trap within a web of deceit and double bluff, because February is Chocho's lawyer; Chocho needs to settle scores and - as fans will remember from Payback - February has only one overriding obsession, to make Bishop pay for maiming her at an MK camp in Angola during the '80s. Soon the streets will run with blood and Bishop will be looking over his shoulder - not just for his own life but to safeguard those he loves.
The Bishop/Buso storyline has proved a winner for Nicol, a "serious" and acclaimed novelist and writer, with Payback prompting a three-book deal from Old Street Publishers, an overseas publisher.
As much as it was a boon to sign a publishing contract, it was a daunting task.
"Writing under deadline as a journalist is one thing, meeting deadlines for fiction are another thing completely," he admits.
Killer Country took 18 months to get down, dramatically less than Payback which was effectively seven years from conception to publication. In fairness, Nicol co-wrote another novel in that time, Out to Score, with Joanne Hichens, in among a raft of other professional writing that he has always been known for doing, from corporate biographies to profiles, in a determined bid to pay his bills solely from his craft.
His fiction writing seems to be paying off... Killer Country pre-sold 1 000 copies before its launch this month and the final instalment, Black Heart, is already at the printers. The word counts have been coming down too; from 125 000 words to 108 000 for Killer Country and 105 000 for Blackheart.
"If you plot them, you can write faster," Nicol laughs, refusing to say anything about the trilogy's end.
One noticeable change, though, has been the greater use of dialogue; "it writes itself, faster", he says.
And, from a reader's perspective, it rams home the richness of the South African scene; you can smell the dust of the Karoo, taste the Amstel on the back of your throat and blink away the smog of a Joburg highveld morning all in one sitting.
"Mace and Pylon allowed me to look at a particular side of the country," he says of the security industry and its inextricable link, for Nicol, with the arms deal.
As a novelist, though, he wants to start writing in the present tense in his future projects. "I want to go back to a more investigative mode and play with that."
It'll be good news for some of his critics, especially the literati who have bemoaned his descent into the lower reaches of the mass market, but Nicol says there's room for both the serious writing and the mastering of the popular genres.
"There's a historical reluctance, particularly because of the apartheid struggle, to have fun in writing. Academics shouldn't be worrying about these things. Most ordinary countries have a commercial literature," he says, "which doesn't threaten serious literature."
South Africa, he says, has flourishing science-fiction and romance markets, and now the crime thriller market is starting to pick up.
"Payback sold 4 000 copies, which isn't a lot internationally, but in terms of South Africa it's getting better. We're now starting to break through the resistance South Africans have for their own authors."
It's something that the Bishop and Buso franchise has made a not insignificant contribution towards.
In the words of Nicol's BEE villain Chocho, that's mighty fine, mighty fine indeed.
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