William Bell, the colonial government representative on Malaita, Solomon Islands, was murdered while collecting taxes in October 1927. The party of native police with him were also massacred. Bell was an Australian, a towering figure in the pacification of the wildest island in the Pacific, and his murder by the Kwaio warrior leader Basiana was the end of a confrontation between two strong men and two opposing ways of life. 

In this book anthropologist Roger M. Keesing, who has spent 16 years among the Kwaio, and academic historian Peter Corris (who later became a crime fiction writer), reconstruct for the first time from both sides the events leading up to Bell's murder and its aftermath

Hardback, DJ, b/w ill., 219pp.