A Darkening Stain

This is the third book by Robert Wilson that I have read, all of them set in West Africa. They are noir, very noir, but I found them mesmerizing.
This book, like the others I have read, star Bruce Medway, an Englishman who fetched up in West Africa after travelling across the Sahara Desert and decided to stay. He runs a private investigation and debt collection business out of Cotonou, Benin. His best friend is Bagado, a detective with the Cotonou Surete. He lives with his girlfriend, Heike, a German who works with an NGO helping Africans with AIDS and HIV. Bruce drinks a lot and he does some seedy jobs but at heart he is a decent guy. Heike has just told him she is pregnant and he is pleased but not quite sure how this is going to work show more out.
Bagado summons him to a ship in port where there are 5 dead men in the hold. Bruce figures out that the men died of suffocation due to toxic fumes offgassing from some fresh lumber in the hold where they stowed away. Bagado also tells him about young African schoolgirls that have gone missing and that the Surete Director, Bondougou, won’t let him near the case. Bagado and Bondougou have had issues for many years and Bagado is almost at the end of his rope. He wants Bruce to find out where the young girls are and also help him get rid of Bondougou. Bruce promises to help him any way he can. The problem is that all the ways he can think of get him deeper into trouble with bad guys and with Heike.
To me this book felt like a West African version of Die Hard with people being killed in more and more horrific ways. I think I’m glad this is the end of the Bruce Medway series. show less

My first Bruce Medway novel.

It follows the queasy moral sense and impeccable scene-setting of such notable predecessors as Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.
Wilson continues to confound expectations, and strenuously resists categorization in any easy fashion. The setting in this book is much different than everything else I've read from him. Also the way the tale is told make it altogether a much grimmer kind of story.
We're not in Agatha Christie territory (whodunits and cozy mysteries with knitting themes). This's more of a sort of gritty crime noir that has been pushed to a whole new, darker level.
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A very nicely done hard-boiled mystery. Very bloody, and a not-resolved look at the nature of corruption, especially in an essentially broken system of authority. The different plot-lines become connected too easily for my taste, and the consequences of the solutions to all the problems are never discussed, and they would be serious psychological and moral consequences if not legal. Such a denouement would have been a nice, heavy conclusion to the themes of the story.

Also, my love for Heike as a (minor, relatively) character knows no bounds.