Tik - Piet Steyn

Pine Pienaar, Kat Harmse, the colourful Freislichs from Virginia... Piet Steyn’s fans know most of the main characters in his latest police novel. And once again it is a story bursting with action and mysteries and ... hormones! Full of drugs too, because this time it is the countrywide increase in tik addiction that is giving our police officers sleepless nights.

The tik epidemic is such an unforeseen tidal wave that has spilled over from the Western Cape to Gauteng that no one less than colonel Kat Harmse of the Hawks is sent to Potchefstroom to attend an international conference on tik addiction at the North West University. Lectures and papers and speeches? Certainly not Kat’s favourite pastimes. If it weren’t for the fact that the forensic pathologist Dr Annie de Villiers (Lovely Annie!) also has to attend the conference, and that a series of very puzzling murders have taken place in the Vredefort Dome in the meantime, he would have told everyone where to get off right there and then.

But then Potch turns out not to be so bad. Annie is staying in the bungalow right next to Kat’s, he runs in to his old friend Kris Freislich in the bar, and notes with naked admiration how Kris’s daughter Baby is all grown up. What is not as obvious to Kat as Baby’s naked midriff is that the Vredefort Dome has become the centre for the distribution of tik. The source of the tik is a mysterious farm in the Vrede district, not far away. It is here that a charismatic religious leader keeps his subjects under his thumb using the Bible and tik. And it is from this farm with its permanently drugged cult group that a certain Charlie Stevens, a well-known figure in the Johannesburg underworld, comes walking across the dome . . .

Goodreads: 3.76