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Robert Wilson - Page 2

Blood is Dirt The Big Killing

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First British Edition harpercollins (1997)

Blood is Dirt
See Review by Val McDermid - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill
Bruce Medway, fixer, and debt collector for anyone in a deeper hole than himself in sweat-soaked Benin, west Africa, has heard a few stories in his time. The one that Napier Briggs tells him is patchy but it doesn't exclude the vital fact that two million of his dollars have gone missing. Bruce is used to imperfect information - people get embarrassed at their own stupidity, and criminality. But for the first time it leads to the gruesome and brutal death of a client.
It would all have ended there but for Napier's daughter, the sexy, sassy and sussed Selina Aguia, a canny commodities broker. She brings money to the game and launches Bruce into the savage world that her apparently innocuous father had chosen to inhabit - a world of oil and toxic waste scams, of mafia money laundering, of death and violence fuelled by drink, drugs and sex. And where a power-hungry Nigerian presidential candidate, a rich, blow-loving American and mafia capo are fighting a silent war in which pawns are badly needed. Worse for Bruce, Selina wants revenge, and with the scam she invents it looks as though she'll get it. But this is a world where blood is dirt - nobody really cares. Not even if they love you.
'Potent, fiercely imagined and not a little frightening' Literary Review

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Paperback - harpercollins (1997)

The Big Killing
See Review by Val McDermid - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill
Bruce Medway, 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 a minder to Ron Collins - a spoilt 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 shoot-out and the discovery of a mutilated body, the prospect of retreating to his bolthole in Benin becomes increasingly attractive - 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 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…
'If I come across as original and blackly funny a thriller again this year, I'll feel myself doubly blest' Irish Times
'The ambience of West African life is captured so strongly you can almost taste it' Val McDermid

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