When Sarah Baumann returns to the Kalahari, she tells herself it is work.

A Canadian researcher with South African roots and a career slipping through her hands, Sarah arrives in Mier expecting a case she can study, contain, and survive. Instead, she finds a land hollowed out by extraction, a murdered girl no one important intends to avenge, and a network of power that stretches far beyond one crime. Mining interests, shell companies, private security, political fixers, and local intermediaries all feed from the same wound. The deeper Sarah goes, the clearer it becomes: the villain is not one man, but a system built to bury truth and call it development.

As the investigation closes in on the elusive Sivle, Sarah is forced into uneasy alliances with trackers, outcasts, and those who still understand the land as memory rather than property. But every answer comes at a cost. Witnesses die. Records vanish. Violence moves through bodies the same way extraction moves through earth—quietly, efficiently, and with permission. And with every compromise Sarah makes to keep the case alive, she begins to understand power not as something to resist from the outside, but as something that survives through timing, delay, and control.

Atmospheric, morally tense, and politically charged, MIER is a literary crime novel about land, identity, corruption, and the terrible intimacy between truth and power. It is the story of a woman who goes looking for justice and finds the machinery that decides what justice is allowed to mean.

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