[Tony Richards]

The first section of this book was inspired by a long trip to Zimbabwe in the early Nineties, back when it was much safer to go there. I still came within a whisker of being robbed a couple of times, but managed to have a fascinating time, starting in the capital, Harare, driving to a nearby game reserve and across the Mvurwi Mountains to the Chinhoyi Caves. I went to Victoria Falls too. I stayed at the Hwange Game Reserve on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. I even managed to get a boat trip down the Zambezi River. And when I arrived home, I eventually put it all into a longish story set in the near future.
I’d already sold several straight mysteries to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and so I thought ‘why not?’ And to my astonishment, editor Linda Landrigan snapped ‘The Very Edge of New Harare’ up, inspiring me to write a number of other tales with the same setting and central character, all of them joining up to form a book-length piece of fiction.