Bruce Medway is a British private investigator living in Cotonou, Benin in West Africa on the Gulf of Guinea. Life is cheap here and brutality a part of everyday life. When young schoolgirls start to disappear, Medway tries at first to remain uninvolved, but when the nine year-old daughter of his best friend and former partner becomes one of the victims, he tries to uncover what is going on and recover his friend’s daughter. He finds corruption at every turn and is himself soon entangled with the criminals he is investigating. For Medway, it is as if he had lifted a rock to look at the slimy creatures that live beneath it, only to find that the rock had somehow grown and trapped him under it as well.A DARKENING STAIN is a tense mystery/thriller that radiates the tropical heat of West Africa. I had not read this author before, but was impressed with this tightly plotted tale. The actions of his characters, though often extreme, seem very real indeed, some are driven by desperation others by an insatiable greed, but all are three dimensional beings whose true natures are shown by what they do as much as by what they say. I would recommend this book to any reader not afraid of the nightmares that could be induced by this truly dark thriller.
