Digital List Price: | $11.99 |
Kindle Price: | $8.99 Save $3.00 (25%) |
Sold by: | Amazon.com Services LLC |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
A Darkening Stain (The Bruce Medway Mysteries) Kindle Edition
When schoolgirls begin to disappear on the West African coast, "troubleshooter" Bruce Medway tries to remain detached. Meanwhile, he reluctantly accepts a job from his former nemesis, the mafia capo Roberto Franconelli. Bruce now has forty-eight hours to find a French trader named Marnier whom not even the mafia can track. Finding the man will mean the end of his life—and failure is not an option.
As Bruce sets out on his assignment, he discovers that it is deeply connected—through gold, greed, and superstition—to the unsettling schoolgirl disappearances. Uncovering the secrets of rich and powerful men can be deadly in a world where corruption abounds. With nowhere to turn for safe haven, Bruce must devise a scam that risks everything in order to stay alive.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateJuly 5, 2004
- File size3922 KB
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
PRAISE FOR A DARKENING STAIN
“Robert Wilson dissects the dark heart of Africa with an insight and
compassion that makes it so sleazily vivid you’d pay money not to go
there.”—VAL McDERMID, a u t h o r o f THE DISTANT ECHO
"Tightly plotted and tautly written ... Perfectly attuned to the violent
wavelength of this unpredictable world."
—THE SUNDAY TIMES (LONDON)
—
From the Back Cover
When schoolgirls begin to disappear on the West African coast, "troubleshooter" Bruce Medway tries to remain detached. Meanwhile, he reluctantly acquires a new job from former nemesis and mafia capo Franconelli. Yet as Bruce sets out on his assignment, he is unable to remain disconnected from the mysterious schoolgirl disappearances, and finds that girls, gold, and greed are all interconnected. Corruption abounds everywhere, and in order to save his own life, Bruce must devise a scam that risks everything.
Robert Wilson, a graduate of Oxford University, is the author of seven novels. He has worked in shipping, advertising, and trading in Africa, and has lived in Greece and West Africa. He currently lives in Portugal and Oxford, England.
About the Author
ROBERT WILSON is the author of numerous novels, including The Company of Strangers and A Small Death in Lisbon, which won the Gold Dagger Award as Best Crime Novel of the Year from Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping, advertising, and trading in Africa, and has lived in Greece, Portugal, and West Africa.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The thirty-five-ton Titan truck hissed and rocked on its suspension as it came to a halt. Shoulders hunched, it gave a dead-eyed stare over the line of scrimmage which was the chain across the opening of the port gates. On the wood panelling behind the cab were two hand-painted film posters of big men holding guns-Chuck Norris, Sly Stallone-the bandana boys. He handed down his papers to the customs officer who took them into the gatehouse and checked them off. Excitement rippled through the rollicking crowd of whippet-thin men and boys who'd gathered outside the gates in the afternoon's trampling heat, which stank of the sea and diesel and rank sweat.
The Titan was loaded with bales of second-hand clothes tied down on to the flat-bed of the truck by inch-thick hemp rope. The driver, faceless behind his visor, kicked up the engine which blatted black fumes from a four-inch-wide pipe, ballooning a passing policeman's shirt. A squeal of anticipation shimmered through the crowd.
Six men, armed with wooden batons the thickness of pickaxe handles, climbed on to the edges of the flat-bed, three a side. Each of them twisted a wrist around a rope and hung off, twitching their cudgels through the thick air. The crowd positioned themselves along the thirty metres of road from the gates to the junction with Boulevard de la Marina. The officer came out with the papers and handed them back up to the driver. He nodded to the man on chain duty who looked at the crowd outside and grinned.
The huge truck farted up some more and lurched as the driver thumped it into gear. He taunted the crowd with his air brakes. They giggled, high-pitched, nearly mad. The chain dropped and the battered, grinning face of the Titan dipped and surged across the line. The men hanging off the back roared and slashed with their batons. The truck picked up some momentum, the cab through the gates now, and the crowd threw themselves at the wall of bales, clawing at the clothes packed tight as scrap metal. The batons connected. Men and boys fell stunned as insects, one was dragged along by the leg of a pair of jeans he'd torn from a bale until a sharp crack on the wrist dropped him. The Titan snarled into second gear.
I saw the boy coming from some way off. He was dressed in a white shirt, a pair of long white shorts and flip-flops. He turned the corner off Boulevard de la Marina up to the port gates and was swallowed up by the mêlée who were now running at a sprint. A baton arced down into the pack and caught the boy on the back of the head. He fell forward, bounced off the hip of some muscled brute who held the reins of a nylon pink nightie stretched to nine feet, and disappeared under the wheels of the Titan.
The crowd roared, and the section around where the boy had fallen collapsed to the ground. The truck pulled away, crashing through the gears. It didn't stop for the Boulevard de la Marina. The driver stood on his horn. Cars and mopeds squirmed across the tarmac. The men riding shotgun stopped swinging their batons and hung on with both hands. The Titan let out a final triumphant blat of exhaust and headed into town.
I got out of my Peugeot and ran across to where the boy had gone down. People came from all angles. Closer, I could see his arm, the white bone of his arm and the blood soaking into the sleeve and up the chest of his shirt. Some of the hoodlums around him were smeared with his blood, four of them upped and ran. The rest were staring down at the mash of flesh and bone and the thick red ooze on the road. Then the boy was picked up and borne away, his crushed arm hanging like a rag, his head thrown back, eyes rolled to white. Three men ran him down to the main road and threw him into a car which took off in the direction of the hospital. Then they stood and looked at his blood on their shirts.
I was called back to my car which was waiting to get into the port. Horns blared. Arms whirled.
'M. Medway, M. Medway. Entrez, entrez! Main-te-nant. Main-te-nant.'
I drove in, threading through the line of trucks waiting to get out, past a pile of spaghetti steel wire just beginning to brown with rust. It was five o'clock in the afternoon. I took a small towel from the passenger seat and wiped away the tears of sweat streaming down my face.
I was heading for a ship called the Kluezbork II, Polish flag, 15,000 tons deadweight. Bagado, my ex-partner in M & B 'Investigations and Debt Collection' and now back in the Cotonou force in his old job as a detective, was waiting for me on board. He had a problem, a five-men-dead problem. But it wasn't as big as the captain's problem which was five men dead on his ship, all stowaways, his vessel and cargo impounded indefinitely and he passing the time of day right now in a hell cell with twenty odd scumbags down at the Sûreté in town.
Bagado had told me to get down to the port as fast as possible because the stink was getting bad and they wanted the bodies on ice pronto, but it was important for me to see the situation down there. Why me? He'd blethered on about my shipping experience, but what he really wanted to do was to talk and since his boss, Commandant Bondougou, had split us up and taken him back into the force he didn't like being seen down at my office too much.
The ship's holds were all open and I caught the smell of the five men beginning to putrefy from the quay. The engineer pointed me to number three hold's hatch where some sick-looking young policemen were hanging around for further instructions. Bagado was waiting on a platform halfway down into the hold. He stood, hands jammed into the pockets of his blue mac, which had more creases than an old man's scrotum. He nodded over the platform's rail at the five dead men. Three of them were propped against the metal wall of the hold looking as if they'd just dozed off while staring at the wall of timber which was the cargo in hold number three. The other two lay on their fronts, in the metre or so in between, like tired children who'd dropped to the floor mid-play. It was a peaceful scene uncreased by violence.
'What are you doing up here?' I asked.
'I don't know what killed them yet,' said Bagado, coming out of his trance, flat, depressed. 'I don't want to go down there and end up like that.'
'How long's the hold been open?'
'Three or four hours.'
'That should have got the air circulating. Let's take a look.'
We climbed down the ladder on to the floor of the hold.
'Looks as if they suffocated to me,' said Bagado. 'No violence, anyway.'
'We're a long way from the engine room,' I said. 'Who found them?'
'The first mate was doing a routine stowaway check and didn't like the smell in here...brought the master to the platform...that was it.'
'The only time I've heard of people suffocating in holds is on tankers, especially after palm oil. Gives off a lot of carbon dioxide. They send in the cleaners and they get halfway down the ladder before they realize they can't breathe. I heard of eight people dying like that in one hold up on Humberside.'
'But this hold isn't enclosed like a tanker's,' said Bagado, leaning against the timber wall.
'Wouldn't matter if the oxygen's displaced from the bottom,' I said, and walked between the bodies to the other side of the hold. Bagado pushed himself off the timber to follow me.
'Damn,' he said, looking at the shoulder of his mac, a big stain on it.
I touched the logs. They were still wet with sap.
'This timber's fresh,' I said.
'Loaded out of Ghana three nights ago.'
'I've heard about some of these hardwoods. They give off fumes, some of them toxic. They're pretty volatile in the heat. You put that in an enclosed hold, the oxygen levels drop...'
'Cause of death-fresh timber,' said Bagado. 'Could be.'
'Who are these guys?' I asked. 'They got any ID?'
'They're all Beninois.'
'How'd they get on board?'
'With the stevedores. They were loading cotton seed in holds one and two over the last couple of days. Four teams of them.'
'You know that?'
'A guess. We're picking up the chef d'équipe now,' he said.
'What am I doing here, Bagado?' I asked. 'You didn't get me down here to talk botany.'
Copyright © Robert Wilson 1997
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
Product details
- ASIN : B00CKDFEAG
- Publisher : Mariner Books; First edition (July 5, 2004)
- Publication date : July 5, 2004
- Language : English
- File size : 3922 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 306 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,046,876 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #4,446 in Organized Crime Thrillers
- #5,090 in International Mystery & Crime (Kindle Store)
- #14,279 in Crime Thrillers (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Robert Wilson has written thirteen novels including the Bruce Medway noir series set in West Africa and two Lisbon books with WW2 settings the first of which, A Small Death in Lisbon, won the CWA Gold Dagger in 1999 and the International Deutsche Krimi prize in 2003. He has written four psychological crime novels set in Seville, with his Spanish detective, Javier Falcón. Two of these books (The Blind Man of Seville and The Silent and the Damned) were filmed and broadcast on Sky Atlantic as ‘Falcón’ in 2012. A film of the fourth Falcón book was released in Spain in 2014 under the title La Ignorancia de la Sangre. Capital Punishment, the first novel in his latest series set in London and featuring kidnap consultant, Charles Boxer, was published in 2013 and was nominated for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. This was followed by You Will Never Find Me in 2014. The third book in the series, Stealing People, will be published in 2015.
ROBERT WILSON is the author of nine previous novels, including A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping, advertising, and trading in Africa, and has lived in Greece and West Africa.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
A Darkening Stain is one of the best pieces of noir fiction I've ever read - I'd compare it favorably to Chandler, Crumley, Cain, Ellroy. The plot is a little hyper, but never comes apart. The characters are well drawn and complex. The picture of western Africa is ugly, brutal; a toxic dump of greed. Medway works through the situation in the best hard boiled style, with a minimum of 'coincidences' to guide him.
But the keystone of this tale is the story which Medway is forced to concoct in order to cover his tracks, and then which he is forced to deliver under emotionally tortured circumstances. I was completely drawn into the wringer with this one, left feeling worked over when I finished the novel. The crowning touch is the line the bad guy delivers which sends Medway over the edge: "They're just blacks, Bruce..."
Good stuff. 4+
Circumstantially, five men are found dead on a boat owned by Marnier, bringing the noble Detective Bagado into the picture, the pivotal moral center of the series. Then innocent schoolgirls begin to disappear, an issue that stirs up enormous public fear. Medway, as usual, has his hands full, juggling villains and thugs, one step ahead of their evil intentions. When Bagado's daughter is one of the targeted schoolgirls, the action heats up and moves in a more violent and graphic direction than any of the previous novels.
Medway trolls the late-night dens of concupiscence, opening up another fertile area of the West Africa coast, the flesh trade, the same low form of the human species found everywhere, where nothing is sacred and everyone is for sale. In order to survive this new dimension, Medway must betray himself in a manner that may destroy everything he values in life.
At this point in the series, Wilson's protagonist is faced with an acute moral dilemma, slithering along the dark side with some of humanity's most despicable characters. Inspector Bagado has been a moral compass, tipping Medway back into reality, saving him from ambiguous circumstances time after time. Meanwhile, Medway's personal life has turned increasingly, well, personal, perhaps to more obviously identify him with recognizable humanity. But Medway's mid-life passion with his now-pregnant girlfriend only adds to the desperate emotional edge of the hard-drinking PI. Perhaps it is time, after all, for Medway to consider a career change. Luan Gaines/2004.