Robert Wilson (1) (1957–)

A car accident. Millions of euros. A Russian gangster drinking champagne in the middle of nowhere. The opening scene of this, the fourth in the quartet of books featuring Seville detective Javier Falcón, does not disappoint. Robert Wilson’s plotting is spot-on. I read this book voraciously as Falcón struggles to get to the whole truth, admiring the way the author weaves together the story strands from the preceding three books so that at the end you understand though you did not guess.
I show more did not get the ending right, I expected something different. There are moments when you wonder if Javier can continue, will he step over to the dark side, will his emotional strength desert him? This is the most international of the four books, with Javier travelling to London and Morocco but Seville retains its hot sultry presence. I can smell the dusty heat of the evening where the detectives seem to exist on coffee and cruelty lays just out of sight.
I’m sorry this is a short review, I can’t write more without giving away the plot. There were moments when I wanted to shout ‘don’t do it’ and others when I thought with sad acceptance ‘yes, that’s the only thing you can do’. At the end, I wanted to start reading the series all over again.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/ show less

A sometimes complex hardboiled mystery involving diamond trading, greed and murder, tinged with politics; set mainly in the Ivory Coast.
There are also some great one-liners. The voice of Bruce Medway's (the narrator) dying father, sounds like "a radio on the other side of a windy railway track." An alley smells like it has "been dabbed with tincture of billy-goat sweat." Medway describes his health: "I was at the age when the extra pounds got belligerent, the heart started to want some time show more off and might take it without asking."
The fragility and richness of life in Africa is on almost every page and makes for a different and readable story. show less

This is not my thing, which is a shame, as there's a good story in here. I just found the levels of violence, especially towards women, to be unpalateable. I'm not going to be able to discuss this without spoilers, so they will follow.
There are 2 distinct story strands, one starting in WW2 and moving forward to the 1990sl, the other set over the timeframe of a few weeks in the 1990s. They meet and merge as the story progresses. The first starts in WW2 with Klaus Felsen, who works for the show more Nazis with a factory making railway coupllings. He's been lined up for a job for the SS and is trying to avoid it. He is involed with Eva, who runs a nighclub and has to liase with the Nazis, as she's good at providing men with what they want. They have a relationship that runs to the sexual and he flees intenselty betrayed when he sees her with the SS man. Whiule this relationship is mostly mutual, that doesnt; seem to be the case for other of Klaus' relationships and this is a general trend across the book. He ends up in Portugal, with a task of smuggling Wolfram, a tungsten containing mineral, out of Portugal into German terretory for making armour piercing weapons. In this he teams up with a local of the boarder lands who he intends to take advantage of (they both do - this book is populated with unpleasant characters that all seem to find each other). Klaus takes advantage of the man's mistress and fathers a child on her. As the war progresses, Klaus' activity moves from smuggling Wolfram into Germany to smuggling gold out. With the local and several SS officers, they form a bank based on the Gold, but as it is majority owned by the local, it counts as a Portuguese bank and so is protected by the local laws. There is a falling out amongst thieves (surprise surprise) and it leaves just Klaus and the local man to run the bank.
As we move on, into the post war world, the illigitimate son, Manuel, takes more prominance, and is equally as unpleasant as his father (real and supposed). He joins the secret police of the dictatorship and is involved in the rape and murder of a political prisioner. As the story moves forward, he turns his attentions to any woman he comes into contact with, not always bothering about consent.
In the 1990s, a young woman is found murdered, having been abused first. She is a teen, but sexually uninhibited. This becomes an avenue for the investigation and it turns into a very sordid world and gives the author yet more opportiunity to describe sex and sexual violence. It's all rather unedifying. The stories come together as the young woman is the daughter of the Lawyer and his wife, but turns out to, again, be illigitimate. The resolution is deeply unpleasant and vindictive.
The sole bright spot in all this unpleasantness is the policeofficer, Ze Coelho. He has a daughter of similar age to the murdered girl and how he deals with her and her growing sexual curiosity is touching. He has lost his wife and develops a tentative relationship with a womon on the periphery of the case that is a sweet spot in the murkiness that surrounds it.
There is a good story in here, but the way the violence is portrayed, particularly the unrelenting sexual violence towards the women that are nmere bit part characters in the book, was just too much for my stomach. I can't reccommend it, on that basis. show less

Bruce Medway is English but left England some years before and crossed the Sahara desert to the coast of Africa in Benin. There he works as a fixer, helping people with problems that pop up. As the book opens he is at the port waiting for a buyer to bring money for a shipment of rice. Wilson's description of the heat and dirt virtually put you at the port. When the buyer does show up she has a sheet filled with bills to pay for the rice. Medway invokes her ire by refusing to give her the show more original bill of lading until he has counted the money. He and his driver then have to get home with all this cash and evade the tail on him. When they get home, Medway's lover, a German woman who works in the north of Benin, is waiting for him. Medway, Heide and Moses, the driver, work all night counting the money. Then Medway realizes they were in fact followed and they have to make a quick getaway.

The action moves from Benin to Togo to Cote d'Ivoire to Nigeria and thankfully there is a map at the beginning so you can keep these places straight. Medway is hired to find a missing Englishman and realizes people are being killed to hide details about some huge deal. On top of that, the political situation in these countries is in a state of flux and Medway has to try to avoid getting involved in that.

Wilson has a deft hand at describing the country and the people so that I learned a lot about living in this part of the world. He also has a dry sense of humour and throws out one-line phrases that made me snort with laughter. For example:
"The fridge opened on to a grapefruit and a soggy pawpaw. The pawpaw didn't hold out both hands and I took the grapefruit, which had more pith on it than an Oscar Wilde aphorism."

There were some first book problems, such as trying to work in too many different story lines and dropping characters along the way. But, it was so good in other ways that I can forgive it that. And from reviews of later books it appears that Wilson learns to deal with those problems.

I'll be looking for more books by this author and I'll be recommending him to other people who enjoy gritty, atmospheric thrillers. show less