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Jump to navigationJump to searchWater Music by Margie Orford (view source)
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{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=Water Music
|author=Margie Orford
|publisher=Head Zeus
|date=February 2014
|website=http://www.margieorford.com/
|summary=An abandoned child found barely alive and a missing teenager are only some of Dr Clare Hart's problems as the South African child protection officer seeks to come to terms with her own problems and a hierarchy intent on wiping out the Section she works for. Gritty crime drama rooted in the social problems of modern Cape Town.
|cover=1781857849
|aznuk=1781857849
|aznus=1781857849
}}
Cassie is out riding on a bridle path hardly used in the height of summer, totally deserted in winter. Her horse takes a tumble, and she goes with it, and stumbles into a tiny, plastic-wrapped child, maybe three-years old, and painfully thin, foot-soles like marble and skin blue with cold.
The book succeeds on both fronts.
If you're not interested in South Africa – there's still a gripping tale to take you on the roller-coaster ride of a forensic specialist's attempts to find the mother of a child found abandoned and tethered in the woods barely alive. These attempts are complicated when a grandfather turns up to the press conference begging help in the search for his missing grand-daughtergranddaughter, a talented cellist, at 19 years of age technically too old to fall within the remit of Section 28. But Clare Hart's not above bending the rules, now and then.
All the usual genre requirements are met: the complicated love-life (Hart's lover is an undercover cop, never around when you need him – unless, maybe, you REALLY DO need him), an unwanted pregnancy, aging ageing / dying parents, inter-departmental squabbles, solid loyalties of the kind that will ignore all career-threatening orders from above. There are the wayward teenagers who may or may not be caught up in the gang thing, the drugs thing.
Trails twist and turn and go cold and heat up… and eventually , our heroine is going to find herself down the proverbial mine…
If you are interested in South Africa you might pay a bit more notice to the corruption that's making Hart's job harder. You might wonder about the casual misogyny that's far worse, far more physical, than we'd expect anyone to be allowed to get away with on our home turf. You might think a bit harder about the harsh divides between the estates, the ''castle'', and the townships, and the basic underlying fear that seems to pervade everyone's life, no matter what their social strata.
