THE DEVIL’S OASIS

Final installment of Bull’s Africa trilogy, begun with the well-received The White Rhino Hotel (1992). That volume, set on the Kenyan frontier at the end of WWI, was a racy, cracking affair that immersed you in a spectacularly self-involved group of English expatriates, including Anton Rider, who was busy chasing the married Gwen Llewellyn. In A Café on the Nile (1998), set in 1935, professional safari guide Rider was obsessed with estranged wife Gwen, while other group members carried on with their wild agendas. The wind-up, set in 1942, shows Rommel’s desert war sweeping through everyone’s life. Anton’s son, Wellington Rider, fights with the French Foreign Legion as Rommel captures Tobruk—and Gwen sleeps with a Nazi sympathizer. Dangerous mines may go off anywhere in these intrigues. Distinguished.