Falls the Shadow

by Mike Nicol

She's a single mother with a surfing-crazy teenage son. She's known as the Jackal and heads the local Internal Crime Unit, keeping cops on the straight and narrow. Her name is Zara Dewane and she doesn't take shit from anybody. But now the bad cops are gunning for her.


A family murder by a cop who turns the gun on himself. In the shed behind his cottage is a cache of Russian automatics, handguns, 9mils, .38s. You don’t need forensics to work out what’s gone wrong. This is a cop with a side racket. Which gets the attention of Captain Zara Dewane of the Internal Crime Unit. What she uncovers about the family murder puts her in the firing line. There are cops running guns stolen from the police armory. There are cops selling guns to gangsters. Thing is, the money chain goes deep into the police hierarchy. Even fingers the political bosses. “Close her down,” comes the order from on high. Kill her, in other words. Making Zara and her family targets. With only one way out.

384 pages, Paperback

Published February 10, 2026

About the author

Born in Cape Town, Mike Nicol was educated there and in Johannesburg, where he began his working life as a journalist. During the 1980s he moved back to Cape Town and worked on the magazine Leadership for a number of years. Towards the end of that decade he published his first novel, The Powers That Be, resigned from the magazine and began what he calls "the scary life of a freelance journalist and writer."