Praise for BLOOD ROSE

Here's a thriller with layered resonances

Source: Independent Newspapers
Author: Arja Salafranca

Dr Clare Hart is back in her second crime thriller to feature this feisty documentary-maker and police profiler. Blood Rose follows hot on the heels of Margie Orford's debut, Like Clockwork, which has enjoyed phenomenal success... In a country notorious for its tiny reading public, Orford's work, and her heroine, have clearly struck a chord.

Part of the success stems from Dr Clare Hart's likable personality. Independent, yet vulnerable, with wounds that lie in her past, this is a character with whom you can identify. She's both flawed and real and infinitely complex. There are, you feel, layers behind layers; this is no cardboard creation.

"Michael Connelly's comment, by the way, was that 'Margie Orford has nailed it'. Yep. True."

Source: Mail & Guardian
Author: Barbara Ludman

Blood Rose has sex, violence, horrific torture (mostly, but not entirely, offstage), politics, and an endorsement from Michael Connelly. What more can a thriller reader ask for?

Orford delivers another page-turner

Source: Cape Times
Author: Robyn Cohen

The verdict? Orford has scored a second hit. Blood Rose is superbly plotted, packed with thrills, spills and canoodling...

Orford presents fascinating insights into the Toppenaar people who live in Namibia. Whereas the action in Like Clockwork was centred in Cape Town, Blood Rose's landscape is Walvis Bay. She grew up in Windhoek: "Ja, I know that desert well."

Believing that school made children "average", her gynaecologist father regularly took them out of school and schlepped them around the country as he went about his job. His work entailed setting up family planning clinics and darting lionesses with Norplant (contraceptive).

A gynae doling out family planning to lions?

"It was an unusual childhood," she says.

Dr Hart's in the House

Source: O - The Oprah Magazine
Author: Samantha Page

Margie Orford (Like Clockwork) is a name you should commit to memory, if you don't already know her work. She has reprised the role of Dr. Clare Hart in Blood Rose (Oshun) and has presented an even more savvy, believable character in this second outing... Blood Rose is an excellent crime thriller and Dr. Clare Hart is set to become as popular as Patricia Cornwell's forensic investigator Kay Scarpeta and Kathy Reich's forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.