Some years ago, Robert Wilson abandoned Africa and his alcoholic, deadbeat English detective-cum- debt-collector, Bruce Medway, for blockbuster thrillers set in Spain and Portugal. I viewed the move of location and the style of these big novels, in which the action sometimes covered decades, with dismay. Unlike the books set in Benin, I thought these only good in parts; but The Hidden Assassins (HarperCollins, £14.99) successfully entwines, in the course of 465 pages, several strands into a complicated, coherent whole.
When Inspector Javier Falcon, Wilson’s Spanish homicide detective in Seville, examines the decomposing body of a naked man on the city’s rubbish dump he realises he’s on to a big case. Huge efforts have been made to obliterate the identity of the corpse: his hands and feet have been expertly removed and his face burnt off.
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