Only the scene is not New York, San Francisco, or some nameless Midwestern town; it's violent, deeply divided Cape Town, mostly the deadly slums known as the Flats. The setting recaptures all the blood and menace that time and nostalgia have effaced from Raymond Chandler's mean streets - and redoubles them.
In classic melodrama fashion, Smith assembles his cast of characters - Billy Afrika, the mercenary with a mission; Roxy Palmer, the wife left with nothing; and the deadly Piper chief among them - moving all toward a common center and bringing them into combination and conflict. Each character's motives are so strong (and so compellingly articulated) that something has to give, usually in violent fashion.
The backdrop for Smith's urban nightmare is both fantastic and hyperrealistic, somewhat in the manner of graphic novels or urban fantasy:
"A woman in a Muslim headscarf scuttled across the road, carrying a plastic shopping bag and a tub of Kentucky chicken, and disappeared into Dark City. Otherwise the road was empty and silent."
Smith's Cape Town slums are as grim as any steampunk Victorian hellhole, and none of his characters - rich, poor, colored, white, or black - has anything better than a bleak present and an infernal past.
The novel's flashbacks, narrative asides, and occasional political jabs, even the inflection of the characters' speech, contribute to a vivid sense of place. The only question is whether that place is Cape Town or hell.
Here is one of the jabs that anchor the novel in the real world:
"But he would rather give his life for that dream. . . . Or, rather, the lives of the ragtag army of boys who had come to believe in him as some kind of hip-hop Selassie."
Here's another:
