Robert Wilson - Javier Falcon 1 The Blind Man of Seville

Before I could start writing this book I had to find out how the police and the judiciary worked and I interviewed a number of people who were all friendly and helpful. I would like to thank Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla Andres Palacios, los fiscales de Sevilla and the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homocidios de Sevilla Simon Bernard Espinosa, who was also very informative about his approach to murder cases. The characters who appear in this book with these titles are in no way representative of the real people nor are the professional relationships between them at all typical.

I would also like to thank Dr Fernando Ortiz Blasco who not only helped me with my hip but was also very informative about bullbreeding and bullfighting.

On the Tangier end of things I was very fortunate to be introduced by Frances Beveridge to Patrick Thursfield, who in turn put me in touch with Mercedes Guitta who lived in Tangier during and after World War 2. I thank them all for their help.

My friend Bindy North was good enough to run her professional eye over the psychological dialogues and give me her opinion, for which I am very grateful.

The main reason this book was written was because of my two friends who live in Seville, Mick Lawson and Jos Manuel Blanco Marcos. Over many years they have decanted, consciously and inadvertently, massive amounts of information about Spain, Andaluca and Seville. They have also been incredibly supportive of me throughout my writing career, rebuilding me when Ive turned up broken and celebrating with me when things have gone right. I have dedicated the book to them, which is a small way of saying that no man could wish for better friends.

Finally I want to thank my wife, Jane, who doesnt see much more of me than a hunched back over a desk but, as always, has helped me with research, given me the benefit of her very sure editorial eye and despatched my frequent doubts to the abyss. I cannot conceive of writing a book without her, which must make her my muse.

The Company of Strangers
A Small Death in Lisbon

JAVIER FALCON NOVELS

The Silent and the Damned
The Hidden Assassins

BRUCE MEDWAY NOVELS

A Darkening Stain
Blood is Dirt
The Big Killing
Instruments of Darkness

Bruce Medway, go-between and fixer for traders in West Africa, smells trouble when a porn merchant asks him to deliver a video at a secret location. Things look up, though, when hes hired to act as minder to Ron Collins, a spoilt playboy looking for diamonds. Medway thinks this could be the answer to his cashflow crisis, but when the video delivery leads to a shootout 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 victims 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

A narrative distilled from pure protein: potent, fiercely imagined and not a little frightening

Literary Review

ISBN 13: 978 0 00 647986 4

Benin, West Africa. Englishman Bruce Medway operates as a fixer for traders on that part of the coast they used to call the White Mans Grave. Its a tough existence, but Medway can handle it until he comes across the formidable Madame Severnou. Warned off further involvement by his client, Jack Obuasi, his energies are redirected into the search for missing expat, Steven Kershaw.

Kershaw, though, is a man of mystery: trader, artist, womanizer and sado-masochist. Against background rumblings of political disturbance and endemic official corruption, Medway pursues his elusive quarry with a doggedness even he cannot explain. But as he soon learns, nothing in Africa is what it seems, and those who seek the truth find out more than they wish to know

A witty, fast-moving and picaresque tale

NELSON DEMILLE

ISBN 13: 978 0 00 647985 7

Bruce Medway, fixer for the great unfixed, does not see the disappearance of schoolgirls off the streets of Cotonou, Benin, as any of his business. That is the domain of his ex-partner, police detective Bagado, and his corrupt boss. Bruce has the more pressing matter of a visit from two sweet-natured mafiosi who want him to find Jean-Luc Marnier, a French businessman in for something nastier than a wrist-slapping.

Then an important schoolgirl goes missing and Bruce gets involved, descending into a deeper darkness of police corruption, mafia revenge, sexual depravity and illegally mined gold. To save himself he conceives a scam, one that will excite the natural greed that prevails along this coast and, when executed out on the black waters of the huge lagoon system, inevitably result in death. But then innocence has always been the burden of dark experience.

Unmissable Unflinchingly imagined and executed. No hint of competition

Literary Review

ISBN-13: 978 0 00 713042 9

Bruce Medway, fixer and debt collector in Benin, West Africa, has heard a few stories in his time. The one that Napier Briggs tells him is patchy but it doesnt exclude the vital fact that two million dollars have gone missing. Bruce is used to imperfect information from clients embarrassed at their own stupidity. But this time it leads to a gruesome death.

It would all have ended there but for Napiers daughter, the sexy, sassy and sussed Selina Aguia, a commodities broker. She 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. Worse for Bruce, Selina wants revenge, and with the scam she invents it looks as though shell get it. But this is a world where blood is dirt nobody really cares. Not even if they love you.

A vivid and steamy stumble on the wild side

VAL MCDERMID

ISBN 13: 978 0 00 713041 2

Lisbon 1944. In the torrid summer heat, as the streets of the capital seethe with spies and informers, the endgame of the Intelligence war is being silently fought.

Andrea Aspinall, mathematician and spy, enters this sophisticated world through a wealthy household in Estoril. Karl Voss, military attach to the German Legation, has arrived embittered by his implication in the murder of a Reichsminister and traumatized by Stalingrad, on a mission to rescue Germany from annihilation. In the lethal tranquillity of this corrupted paradise they meet and attempt to find love in a world where no-one can be believed.

After a night of extreme violence, Andrea is left with a life-long addiction to the clandestine world that leads her from the brutal Portuguese fascist rgime to the paranoia of Cold War Germany, where she is forced to make the final and the hardest choice.

Displaying once again Wilsons gifts for atmospheric depiction of place, this ambitious experiment is streets ahead of most other thrillers

JOHN DUGDALE, Sunday Times

A big, meaty novel of love and deceit with this novel Wilson vaults to the front-rank of thriller writers

PETER GUTTRIDGE, Observer

ISBN 13: 978 0 00 651203 5