Icarus by Deon Meyer

 

I picked this up on kinda a whim, kinda on the strength of a mythological reference, and it's a pretty good police procedural--feels very much like one of a series, lots of arcs kinda in midair, pretty easy to figure out the general fictional position. There's a lot of Afrikaans thrown about, some of which is almost certainly slang (and some of the slang may not be entirely derived from Afrikaans) and it's not always easy to pick out all the meanings from context, but that's ... fine. The book was written in Afrikaans and translated to English, so some of that's probably the translator's choice--again, it's fine. The characters feel pretty well lived-in, human; the police are probably at least somewhat idealized, as is the way of fiction, and even the not-good people are probably smoothed out some, though there's plenty of human complexity, here.