The Big Killing
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An evocative and atmospheric thriller set along the part of the African coast they used to call the White Man’s Grave, The Big Killing is the second novel to feature Bruce Medway
Bruce Medway, go-between and fixer for traders in steamy West Africa, smells trouble when he’s approached by a porn merchant to deliver a video to a secret location. And just to add to his problems, BB, Medway’s rich Syrian patron, hires him to act as minder to Ron Collins – a spoilt playboy in Africa to buy diamonds – in the Ivory Coast.
All this could be the answer to his cashflow crisis, but when the video delivery leads to a shootout and the discovery of a mutilated body, Medway is more inclined to retreat to his bolthole in Benin – especially as the manner of the victim’s death is too similar to a current notorious political murder for comfort.
His obligations, though, keep him fixed in the Ivory Coast and he is soon caught up in a terrifying cycle of violence. But does it stem from the political upheavals in nearby Liberia, or from the cutthroat business of the diamonds? Unless Medway can get to the bottom of the mystery, he knows that for the savage killer out there in the African night, he is the next target…
Reviews
‘If I come across as original and blackly funny a thriller again this year, I’ll feel myself double blest’ Irish Times
‘A class act’ Sunday Times
‘First in a field of one’ Literary Review
About the author
Robert Wilson spent several years in West Africa and draws on this experience for his Bruce Medway novels. He and his wife now live in Portugal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even though it was published in the U.K. in 1996, Wilson's second Bruce Medway West African mystery seems particularly timely: at the start, Medway sits in a bar in the Ivory Coast and reads the latest details of a rebel-led war in neighboring Liberia. Those rebels have something to do with a series of murders, beatings, robberies and other assorted acts of mayhem that dog the resilient, alcohol-soaked Englishman as he tries to stay alive. "I do jobs for people who don't want to do the jobs themselves," Medway explains to a very large porno dealer, Fat Paul, who hires him to deliver a video and soon becomes one of the many violated corpses in Bruce's wake. Best known for his Gold Dagger winning A Small Death in Lisbon, Wilson writes concisely but poetically about a callously brutal side of African life that might shock readers lulled by the sweetness of Alexander McCall Smith's stories about Botswana. But Medway's bloody misadventures, as he tries to protect a pampered diamond dealer from having his stones and his body parts ripped off by corrupt police and other villains, ring with a dark, sad credibility of their own. And Wilson also pulls off the surprising feat of making us see just what it is about life in West Africa that keeps Medway from giving it up to return to England or to follow his lost lover to Berlin.
