title: The Big Killing (Bruce Medway Mysteries, No. 2)
author:  Robert Wilson 
description: Even though it was published in the U.K. in 1996, Wilson's second Bruce Medway West African mystery seems particularly timely: at the start, Medway sits in a bar in the Ivory Coast and reads the latest details of a rebel-led war in neighboring Liberia. Those rebels have something to do with a series of murders, beatings, robberies and other assorted acts of mayhem that dog the resilient, alcohol-soaked Englishman as he tries to stay alive. "I do jobs for people who don't want to do the jobs themselves," Medway explains to a very large porno dealer, Fat Paul, who hires him to deliver a video and soon becomes one of the many violated corpses in Bruce's wake. Best known for his Gold Dagger-winning A Small Death in Lisbon, Wilson writes concisely but poetically about a callously brutal side of African life that might shock readers lulled by the sweetness of Alexander McCall Smith's stories about Botswana. But Medway's bloody misadventures, as he tries to protect a pampered diamond dealer from having his stones and his body parts ripped off by corrupt police and other villains, ring with a dark, sad credibility of their own. And Wilson also pulls off the surprising feat of making us see just what it is about life in West Africa that keeps Medway from giving it up to return to England or to follow his lost lover to Berlin.<BR>Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  # The TORTURE WINCH
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### By DONALD BAYNE HOBART
  
  
  This page formatted 2005 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
      
  
  Etext from pulpgen.com
  
  
  
  
  
  **Death Reaches Out to Grasp Innocent Victims in the Gory Clutch of
  
  
  Greed and Inhumanity**
  
  
  
  
  
  _
  
  
    
  Thrilling Mystery,
  
  
  _ September, 1938
  
  
  THE pale light from the flickering candles cast a wan glow over the
  
  
  white, still face of the elderly man who had been placed on the bed.
  
  
  Over the room hung the grim hush of death, broken only by the gentle
  
  
  sobbing of one of the two slender blond girls who stood with their
  
  
  heads bowed in grief.
  
  
  Bob Weldon glanced at the three other people present, his gaze that
  
  
  of a friend of the family who was able to isolate his emotions from
  
  
  what was going on about him, yet his keen gaze missed no details of the
  
  
  scene.
  
  
  He saw the dazed, vacuous expression on the sallow countenance of
  
  
  Jason Heath. Martin Clark's nephew was obviously n