Robert Wilson is one of the most exciting authors that I’ve discovered recently. His books set in Portugal and Spain, with their melding of the past and present, history and imagination, (see earlier reviews) are gripping reads. This is part of another series, featuring Bruce Medway, a man-of-all-work, and are set in the contemporary poverty, dust and greed of the corrupt drifters, scammers, and politics of the West African nations along the Atlantic coast. This is a vastly different world from the sweet and inviting landlocked Botswana in the south of Africa as portrayed by Alexander McCall Smith.
Wilson’s protagonist Medway is a white man who ekes out a living by doing the various jobs that come his way from his network of warlords, other expatriots, businesspeople, informers, and drinkers. This book, the second in this series, starts out with Medway agreeing to deliver a video for a porn seller to a white man. The deliver must occur under secret circumstances, but Medway needs money, and what could go wrong?
What can go wrong are too many deaths, from up-and-coming political figures to a British playboy, and Medway worries that the next death may be his. The trail goes across national borders to the secret world of diamond traders. As usual, Wilson’s brilliant writing pulls us into these unknown worlds so we can feel the itching skin created by the heat and the dust, the terror of rope bridges late at night across ravines, the violence of too many people seeking too few resources, whether of money, diamonds, or food, all looking for the big killiing. Not a light read, but well worth it—even staying up most of the night because each page calls you to continue.
