From the photograph she keeps beside her bed, Maria Goosen will always remember her son as her little ice cream boy, smiling from the frame on a beach in Margate with a cone in his hand. Everyone else know Gideon Goosen as a monster: a gangster, assassin and murderer, who made a pact with the devil and deserves to live out his days in a solitary cell in Pretoria Central. How is it possible that the son of a decorated, God-fearing security policeman could fall so low?
His mother blames it on his friends from the other side of the railway line in Randfontein, others on a leggy pr***itute from Nigel who became his obsession. Gideon himself believes everything changed on an autumn morning when the fatal pellets from a pump-action shotgun cut short the life of an anti-apartheid activist in the driveway of his home.
Set against the backdrop of the dying days of apartheid, and inspired by a true story and events that really happened, Jacques Pauws explosive debut novel Little Ice Cream Boy exposes the raw, seamy underworld of gangsterism and brutality when life was cheap and fear was everywhere.