Michael Stanley Books in Order

If you want the main Detective Kubu run: A Carrion Death → A Deadly Trade / The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu → The Death of the Mantis
If you want young Kubu first: Facets of Death → A Deadly Covenant → A Carrion Death
If you want later, bigger stakes: Deadly Harvest → Dying to Live → A Death in the Family
If you want a standalone outside Kubu: Dead of Night
If you want short fiction first: Detective Kubu Investigates → Detective Kubu Investigates 2 → African Mysteries

Michael Stanley is the shared pen name of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, two South Africans who turned a long friendship and a taste for adventure into a writing partnership. Their books are best known for the Botswana based Detective Kubu mysteries, but what really holds the work together is sharp plotting, deep local knowledge, and a real affection for the people and places they write about.

Sears was born in Johannesburg and grew up in Cape Town and Nairobi. During the apartheid years his family moved to Australia, where he studied mathematics, but Africa pulled him back. He returned to Johannesburg, worked at the University of the Witwatersrand, and later managed remote sensing for a major mining company. That background helps explain why mining, landscapes, wildlife, and the practical details of southern Africa feel so lived in on the page.

Trollip was also born in Johannesburg. He studied statistics there, spent part of his student years in sport and anti apartheid politics, and later earned a PhD in educational psychology at the University of Illinois. Most of his career was spent as a professor and then as a leader in online learning. He is also a pilot, and aviation became one of the shared threads in the partnership.

The key turn came on their flying safaris through Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Those trips were not gentle sightseeing holidays. Between them, Sears and Trollip have tracked lions at night, fought bush fires, shooed elephants off dirt airstrips, and watched navigation maps scatter over the Kalahari after a plane door popped open. On one of those journeys they began talking about a novel set in Botswana, a place they loved for its wildlife, big landscapes, and complicated modern history. That conversation eventually became A Carrion Death.

The first Kubu novel introduced Assistant Superintendent David Bengu, nicknamed Kubu, the Setswana word for hippopotamus. He is large, patient, decent, and much harder to push around than he first appears. Readers who come for the murder plots tend to stay for him. A Carrion Death brought the duo early notice with several first novel award nominations, and later The Death of the Mantis won the Barry Award for Best Paperback Original.

The books that followed kept widening the picture. A Deadly Trade / The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu draws Kubu into murder and buried history at an isolated camp. Deadly Harvest and Dying to Live pull in missing girls, witch doctors, smuggling, and corruption without losing sight of character. A Death in the Family turns the story painfully personal. Then Facets of Death and A Deadly Covenant step back to show Kubu earlier in his career, when he is still finding his feet as a detective and as a man.

Place matters just as much as plot.

Whether they are writing about the Kalahari, the Okavango Delta, Gaborone, or the politics around mining and poaching, Michael Stanley's books keep one foot in the crime story and the other in the real pressures of southern Africa. They have also written the Crystal Nguyen thriller Dead of Night and several short story collections, including Detective Kubu Investigates and African Mysteries. Today Sears lives in Knysna on South Africa's south coast, while Trollip divides his time between Minneapolis, Denmark, and Cape Town.