The Big Killing
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Bruce Medway is the target of a deadly conspiracy in “this darkly tangled thriller” by the CWA Gold Dagger Award–winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon (Kirkus Reviews).
As a fixer, Bruce Medway makes his living doing things other people don’t want to do. And in the seedier corners of West Africa, there are plenty of tasks that need doing. For example, porn producer Fat Paul needs someone to deliver a video to the Ivory Coast, but the recipients will only trust a white man to make a drop. A Syrian millionaire wants Bruce to travel to Korhogo to fire someone on his payroll. And Martin Fall, head of security at a firm back home in England, needs a man to keep an eye on diamond hunter Ronald Collins.
Seems like three easy gigs for Bruce until two of his clients end up dead and the third goes missing. All three cases are dangerously tied to a group of Liberian rebels determined to wreak havoc wherever they go. Now, Bruce needs to outwit a band of killers all gunning for him before he becomes part of their swiftly rising body count.
“The action is furious and the one-liners . . . would have made even Raymond Chandler jealous.” —The Sunday Times
“Wilson writes concisely but poetically about a callously brutal side of African life that . . . ring[s] with a dark, sad credibility.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
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.
