LET’S FACE IT: we all need a beautiful page turner, that sets us on fire and gives us something potent to come home to. This is Craig Higginson’s 2023 novel, The Ghost of Sam Webster. And yes, it’s a thriller, but there’s depth to it which is about being human in a complicated world. It presents an engagement with characters so rich and deep, that by the end of the story, you feel as though you know them personally, and the final few pages makes you dread the imminent absence of them in your life. This does sound like the hype to some runaway Netflix series, but we’re looking here at a tangible paperback which contains a well-crafted monster of a tale that cleaves the messiness of a South African colonial landscape, littered with bloody history and damaged people, as it is, and highlighted with a dangerous beauty and a mystery, replete with an unbreakable thread of red herring. You won’t be able to stop, till you finish.

It is here where we meet the Webster family and the sinews of the Hawthorne family. They’re about old roots, loves and conquests; warfare between British soldiers and AmaZulu warriors in the previous century; and rivers that, once filled with blood, are now lures for tourist retreats. But the slice of story that Higginson gives us is one tainted with betrayal and mystery, secrets and brokenness.

Caroline and Bruce Webster run a BnB in the gorgeous Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal. They have two children, 17-year-old Samantha and Matthew, a few years younger. Both of them go to private schools in the district. With Higginson’s astute eye and pen, you have strong ideas as to how they look and smell, think and move. You would know them in the street. You also have potent insights into their hidden broken bits, which fit together in ways that will keep your eye on the page as you rush through the text. Not a whodunnit in the crass sense, this is a tale with hairpin bends and understandings of good and evil characters within a veil of rich ambiguity, forcing you from being able to take clear sides about any of them.

And something, as the title tells you, happens to Sam. She’s on the cusp of finishing school, has Tom, the perfect boyfriend, and a set of values that are her own. Enter Tim Greene. A magnetic young man who is employed by Sam’s dad. He’s arrogant and full of himself, but vulnerable.

But then there is Daniel Hawthorne. A long-time friend of the area and the establishment, he’s a writer with a commercial job and dreams of less commercial research that touches on the lost secrets of his family. Secrets of butterflies and moths, of love and loss. In a sense, he’s the narrator.

Like a classic Agatha Christie tale, all the characters are spun together around a single moment in time. All are implicated. All have their alibis. Unlike anything you may have read before, this is not a simple crime tale or a drama that unpicks historical guilt.

The title of the book implies a Gothic tale of spooks from a bygone era and the things that go boo in the night. This is neither, and both. Ghosts and butterflies, biases and recriminations populate the text in a bouquet of different ways; there is also a give and take between 1879, the time of the battle of iSandlwana, and the 2020s; our time.

Higginson has a clear gift for injecting firm threads of rumination into his text, which are not necessarily put into the voice or mind of any of his characters. They’re observations. These passages enrich the fabric of the text without making the material difficult to read. And without giving the authorial voice an unwarranted presence. In Higginson’s hands, the narrative voice slips gently into the text’s fabric allowing a three-dimensionality that distinguishes a piece of literature from a jolly good yarn.

For instance, there is a beautiful tract in this book about the hubris of raw talent and how it grows and becomes self-obsessed and later self-reflective in and beyond a university context. Weather and geography are given the potency of emotional choreography in Higginson’s words, and you find yourself cast amid the viciousness of South African weather and the inner turmoil of his characters at their denouements in life.  

But The Ghost of Sam Webster is not completely flawless. Between a distinctly bland cover design, the text features some odd layout decisions which trouble the reading a tad. The isiZulu snatches of words uttered in the text are not italicised or translated; convention would dictate both. Also, there are sub-headings, which a la Dickens novels published in a bygone era, offer a succinct summation of what lies ahead. The values of these nuances, which seem rather self-absorbed, is questionable. But as the momentum of the novel takes on its own, a story told in current times and another focused on a taboo relationship in times of turmoil, you forget all the niceties and become riven to the spine of the narrative and the flesh it carries. It’s a beautiful read.

• The Ghost of Sam Webster by Craig Higginson is published by Picador Africa, Johannesburg (2023).