The Girl with the Crooked Nose

In The Girl with the Crooked Nose, Ted Botha tells the absorbing story of Frank Bender, a gifted, self-taught artist who can bring back the dead and the vanished through a unique, macabre sculpting talent. Bender has been the key to solving at least nine murders and tracking down numerous criminals. In 2003, he was called upon to tackle the most challenging and bizarre case of his career.

Someone is killing the young women of Juárez. Since 1993, the decomposing bodies of as many as four hundred victims, known as feminicidios, have been found in the desert surrounding this gritty Mexican border town. Prodded by local political pressure and international attention, the Mexican authorities turn to the United States to help solve these horrific crimes. The man they turn to is Bender.

Through breathtakingly realistic sculptures, Bender has made it his career to reconstruct the faces of unknown murder victims and of fugitives whose appearances are certain to have changed over years on the run. The busts are based in part on the painstaking application of forensic science and art to fleshless human skulls and in part on deep intuition, an uncanny ability to discern not only a missing face but the personality behind it.

Arriving in Mexico, Bender works in secrecy, in a culture of corruption and casual violence, braving anonymous threats and sinister coincidences to give eight skulls back their faces and, hopefully, their histories. Drawn to one skull in particular – ‘the Girl with the Crooked Nose’ – Bender gradually comes to suspect that perhaps he is not meant to succeed, and that the true solution to the mystery of the feminicidios is far more terrible than anyone has dared to imagine.

Ted Botha brilliantly weaves Bender’s story – the cases he has solved, the intricacies of his art, the colorful characters he encounters, and the personal cost of his strange obsession – with the chilling story of the Juárez investigation. The Girl with the Crooked Nose will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

Mongo, Adventures in Trash

Mongo, according to the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, is New York lingo for any discarded object that is retrieved. When Ted moved to Manhattan from South Africa, where people constructed homes out of what others considered trash, he decorated his apartment with furniture he found on the streets. Soon he realized he wasn't the only person finding things of value in the garbage, and he began roaming the streets meeting all kinds of collectors, united by their obsession with mongo.

This book is a record of his travels among the collectors, who are as varied as the kind of mongo they seek. They range from housewife to homeless man, from accountant to computer consultant; from retrenched bank worker to full-time collector. One man finds jewelry in the sludge of New York's sewers; another has built one of the most extensive rare book collections in the city. The myriad reasons for collecting open a window into the range of human desires: some people collect for fun, others to make a living; some to find friends, others to snoop; some to make a political statement, others because it is an addiction. Collecting mongo is a longtime, universal phenomenon, and, as the publisher Bloomsbury says, is "at last receiving a worthy literary appreciation."

The Expat Confessions
(with Jenni Baxter)

Ted became an expatriate in 1995, Jenni Baxter in 1990. He moved to New York by way of France, she to Australia by way of London. In their new countries, they created new lives, built new homes, made new friends and learned how to talk with a different accent. But there was one thing that neither of them ever forgot - South Africa. In fact, it was because of their South African connection and a South African website that they met, became firm friends and decided to tell the story of what it's like to be a South African abroad. They contacted South Africans far and wide - from Taiwan to Hawaii, Sydney to Sudan, Christchurch to Canada, London to L.A. - and got their take on living abroad and leaving their homeland behind. Their stories are surprising, funny, tragic, heartfelt, frustrating, racist and sometimes even quite sad. They are The Expat Confessions.

Apartheid in my Rucksack

When Ted left Pretoria in 1986 to travel overland through Africa to England and North America, he wanted to escape South Africa. He wanted a period of respite from the political turmoil, the riots, the apartheid that he had been writing about daily. He wanted to lose himself in travel, and perhaps even look for a new home abroad. But forgetting South Africa wasn't that easy. Despite his rigorous efforts to immerse himself in my travels, his errant thoughts kept turning homeward, and South Africa and her spurious policies dogged his every step.

The world was captivated and consumed by South Africa and he repeatedly found himself in situations that recalled home. On Lake Malawi, he met with Americans who had been arrested on suspicion of being South African spies. In Tanzania he was declared a Prohibited Immigrant because of his Afrikaans surname. He arrived in America the week that Congress passed its momentous anti-apartheid legislation, while Paul Simon's album Graceland was filling the streets with the sound of township mbaqanga. And all along the way he met with exiles: bogus ones in Nairobi and real ones in Scotland, New York and Vancouver, all trying in vain to forget home.