A meerkat private detective comes home to a Karoo dorp where nothing happens, hangs a sign in a window above the bottle store, and gets hired for crimes so small the town is embarrassed to name them. Everyone blames the baboon. He checks.

Five cases, each a little bigger than the last: a stolen koeksister recipe, a missing rugby jersey, a borehole pump that walked off a farm, a radio that went dead in the middle of a council reading, and the night the town's own objection went missing from a safe.

By the fifth, the small things turn out to have been one thing all along.

Deduce it in the notebook

Every case is solved in Hendrik's notebook, chapter by chapter, by completing deductions. Talk to the town, inspect scenes through the lens, and read what people have left lying around. The clues you uncover become the words you can use to fill the blanks.

Get a sentence right and it stamps. Get the chapter right and the case moves. Nothing is hidden behind a click you could not have known to make.

A town that answers back

Twenty-odd Southern African animals, each unmistakably somebody you would find in a town like this: the sergeant with one lamp and one logbook, the auntie who counts signatures three times, the boy in the dungarees, and the salesman who only carries the bags.

Ask the right question in the right chapter and they'll tell you. Ask too early and you'll get gossip.

Hendrik has opinions

Hendrik narrates every case in his own head, fully voiced: short, dry, past tense, and never quite convinced the town deserves him.

One choice at the end

When the last case closes, the report is written. File it, or tear the page out. The town lives with what you decide, and the Case Files remember.

Not a true story. A true town.

Doringbult is made up. Everything around it is not.

The padstal and the stoep, the bottle store and the church hall kitchen, the tannies and the ooms, the sergeant everyone calls Sersant, the koeksisters counted for the bazaar and the biltong on the hooks: this is a South African dorp written by a South African, with the animals of the place standing in for its people.

The names are Afrikaans, the manners are Karoo, and the jokes land the way they land on a stoep at dusk.

Small, alive, and painted

Five cases. Roughly four hours from the first koeksister to the last page. Two endings. Twenty achievements.

Every room is an illustrated diorama: light through its windows, dust in the shafts, a fly through the kitchen, crickets at night, and a sound bed of its own.