The Car Guard's Notebook
A Cape Town Mystery

About this book:

On the wind-blasted streets of Cape Town, Blessing wears a sun-bleached orange vest and a mind like a steel trap. As a car guard on Kloof Street, he's invisible to the drivers who toss him coins—exactly how he likes it. While they sip flat whites, he memorizes every license plate, every dent, every habit: the lawyer's Wednesday wine run, the pensioner's Tuesday tip, the Audi driver's twenty-two-minute bakery stop. The street is his ledger, its rhythms as predictable as the South Easter—until a grey Volkswagen Polo shatters the pattern, mowing down an old man and vanishing into the dusk.

Blessing caught the plate. CA 754-892. He caught the missing grille, the cracked bumper, the model year. He caught what the police cameras missed. Now the city's most overlooked witness holds the only thread to a killer, pulling him from the curb into a investigation that snakes from Salt River mechanics to Signal Hill stakeouts, from Bo-Kaap rain to Waterfront confrontations. In a world where everyone pays by tap and nobody carries change, Blessing deals in something rarer: the truth that hides in plain sight.

Atmospheric, sharp, and utterly South African, *The Car Guard's Notebook* introduces a detective unlike any in crime fiction—a man who guards cars for a living but guards secrets for a living wage. Twenty-six chapters. One hit-and-run. A city's worth of clues waiting to be read.