Monkey Business. The Murder of Anni Dewani: the facts, the fiction, the spin, by Mike Nicol

Monkey Business. The Murder of Anni Dewani: the facts, the fiction, the spin, by Mike Nicol. Random House Struik Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2011. ISBN 9781415201145 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0114-5

Anni Dewani was a bride for just twelve days. She was 28 years old. On a honeymoon to Cape Town she was murdered in a township hijacking. But was it a hijacking? Or was it a hit? Soon her husband was in the frame with two gunmen and the fixer. Mike Nicol's "Monkey Business" takes a close look at the facts, the fiction and the spin of this case dating from 2010.

Mike Nicol  

[...] Cape Town-based private detective Dave Miller told Maars.net that the father and brother of the missing woman from Britain phoned him in the early hours on the night of her disappearance to ask him to get involved in the search for her. Miller, a former South African Police Service detective who now runs Sleuth Detectives, said, 'When you have someone in a state of shock, and the first three or four minutes it's like a bomb has exploded, you want everything done at once but my view is that you let it take its course and not run in like a bull in a china shop. In the morning when the daylight arrived, if police hadn't taken them seriously, if they had not allocated senior officers, I would get involved. I just told the family that it was terrible and I hoped she was alive and I would get involved but let's just give it five or six hours. Let's see what the police come up with.' I emailed Dave Miller and asked him if the father and brother had been referred to Sleuth Detectives or whether they had found them in the Yellow Pages. Two days later he responded in hard-boiled pi style: 'At this stage i do not want to add anything else to my statement.' From the very first news report on the murder of Anni Dewani many of us in South Africa thought the tragedy sounded wrong. Our understanding of hijackings and murders didn't gel with the story of this hijacking and murder. When the husband hired a lawyer and a spin doctor, like everyone else, I was intrigued, both as a crime novelist and as a journalist. Intrigued in equal parts by what had happened and by those who told the story of what had happened. And what continued to happen. This is a story made up of many voices: those of Anni Dewani's husband, of her family, friends, of police, politicians, reporters, bloggers, lawyers, spin doctors, court records, private detectives, hitmen and cctv footage. [...]

This is an excerpt from the book: Monkey Business. The Murder of Anni Dewani: the facts, the fiction, the spin, by Mike Nicol.

Title: Monkey Business
Subtitle: The Murder of Anni Dewani: the facts, the fiction, the spin
Author: Mike Nicol
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Random House Struik
Imprint: Umuzi
Cape Town, South Africa 2011
ISBN 9781415201145 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0114-5
Softcover, 15 x 22 cm, 128 pages