Africa

Jana van der Merwe examines a brutal murder in Welkom, a small Free State mining town in South Africa, following the police investigation and ensuing trial in detail. The book explores how a violent killing exposed deep personal betrayals and the workings of justice, and community complicity, in a close-knit former gold-mining community.

Kathy Cook documents the mass abduction of girls and young women by Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army under Joseph Kony, forced into domestic servitude, sexual slavery and combat. Through survivor testimony, the book exposes a brutal insurgency's systematic use of children as instruments of war and the difficult struggle to bring captives home.

John Bauschatz surveys the institutions and practices of law enforcement, policing and criminal adjudication in Ptolemaic Egypt from 332 to 30 BCE, drawing on an exceptional archive of surviving papyri. The scholarly study reconstructs in granular detail how Greek and Egyptian authorities pursued thieves, mediated disputes and maintained civic order in the ancient Hellenistic world.

Isha Sesay, a CNN journalist who covered the story from the start, reports on the April 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok by Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria. Drawing on survivor testimony and firsthand reporting, the book recounts their captivity, the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign and the government failures that left many still missing.