The Big Killing [Anglais] [Broché]

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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the second Bruce Medway book, after Instruments of Darkness (2003), the boozing big guy is broke, bored, and killing time in Ivory Coast, awaiting an errand from the millionaire who holds his marker. There's civil war in neighboring Liberia, and locally someone is killing people and gutting them with metal claws. Before you can say "the plot thickens," Medway has three jobs: delivering a mysterious videotape, baby-sitting a young diamond trader, and checking up on a missing plantation manager. That everything is related won't come as a surprise, although the manner in which things come together is nearly impossible to predict (mystery lovers lacking stellar powers of concentration may find themselves paging back from time to time to sort it all out). Wilson has chosen a natural setting for his very dark noir and peopled it well, with weary heroes, damaged dames, and slimy lowlifes who employ an excellent hard-boiled parlance. Unfortunately, there's so much of everything--plot, characters, twists, death, and gore--these gifts become a little bit of a burden. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

In this second novel of the Bruce Medway series, our hero, a go-between and "fixer" for traders in steamy West Africa, smells trouble when a porn merchant asks him to deliver a video at a secret location. Things look up, though, when he's hired to act as minder to Ron Collins, a spoiled playboy looking for diamonds in the Ivory Coast. Medway thinks 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, he wants out. Obligations keep Medway fixed in the Ivory Coast and he is soon caught up in a terrifying cycle of violence. Unless he can get to the bottom of the mystery, Medway knows that for the savage killer out there in the African night, he is the next target.

Robert Wilson is the author of seven novels, including A Small Death in Lisbon, which won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of 1999 from Britain's Crime Writers Association. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping, advertising, and trading in Africa, and has lived in Greece and West Africa. He currently lives in Portugal and Oxford, England.