Closed Circle

The third book in Ebersohn's ( A Lonely Place to Die ) Yudel Gordon series is a political thriller set in South Africa during the 1980s. Prison psychologist Gordon is hired by a white activist to investigate secret police involvement in killings of other radicals, both white and black, years earlier. In this he is unofficially aided by his best friend, Col. Freek Jordaan of the Pretoria CID. As a government-employed South African, Gordon has the advantage of position and contacts, but as a Jew he is also an outsider. A liberal but not a radical, a South African but not an Afrikaner, he is warned by a colonel of the secret police that ``Afrikanerdom is a closed circle, complete and perfect.'' In this compelling commentary on an unjust society, South African Ebersohn wraps up his narrative's mystery, but leaves his tale, like his country's political crisis, without an ultimate, moral resolution. (Aug.)