Ancestral voices - Etienne van Heerden

In the wild night hours, or during the heat of the day, when the sun seems to want to drag blood from the very stones, and man's thoughts whirl feverishly — then, truth and fantasy, the past and the future, life and death are indiscriminately mingled on Toorberg, home of the Moolman family.

The magistrate has all this to remember as he investigates the strange circumstances of the death of little Noah, child of grief, who was not entirely of this world. Every day the case becomes more complex, until it challenges the very foundations of the law. It seems as if the magistrate will have to judge an entire dynasty, both the living and the dead. Everyone's guilt has to be affirmed, or denied, and this means he will have to rip open the lives of all.

But the Moolmans are a tribe who have long since learned how to deal with their own. Parents cut children out of their lives, shunt them aside to live as step-children, scraps-ends of the clan, or as city-dwellers whose names are never uttered. The Moolmans cannot forgive, not when their tribal blood is betrayed.