'The street was quiet and deserted ...a few yellow leaves fluttered to the ground and a brilliant blue sky beckoned through skeletal branches. It was a perfect day for murder.' From the photograph she keeps beside her bed, Maria Goosen will always remember her son as her 'little ice cream boy', smiling from the frame on a beach in Margate with a cone in his hand. Everyone else knows Gideon Goosen as a monster: a gangster, assassin and murderer, who made a pact with the devil and deserves to live out his days in a solitary cell in Pretoria Central. How is it possible that the son of a decorated, God-fearing security policeman could fall so low? His mother blames it on his friends from the other side of the railway line in Randfontein, others on a leggy prostitute from Nigel who became his obsession. Gideon himself believes everything changed on an autumn morning when the fatal pellets from a pump-action shotgun cut short the life of an anti-apartheid activist in the driveway of his home.
Set against the backdrop of the dying days of apartheid, and inspired by a true story and events that really happened, Jacques Pauw's explosive debut novel exposes the raw, seamy underworld of gangsterism and brutality when life was cheap and fear was everywhere.
- ISBN10 0143025929
- ISBN13 9780143025924
- Publish Date 9 April 2009
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 15 July 2010
- Publish Country ZA
- Publisher Penguin Random House South Africa
- Imprint Penguin Books (South Africa)
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 387
- Language English