Robbie's Wife

This book contains many nice surprises. Here are just a few: 1) The writing quality is considerably more sophisticated than most noir. 2) This book evolves in surprising, but justified ways. 3) The 'writer as protagonist' technique works very well. 4) Hill does a good job of incorporating real life facts (culling of farm animals under Blair) 5) Hill has a good grasp for the under culture in the English countryside 6) Hill's characters are finely drawn. The dialog is rich in character, but moves along nicely. 7) Hill's 'sense of place' for rural England is very strong. This is a thoroughly enjoyable book that surprises in the end. Well worth picking up.

This is not really a 'Crime' novel. This is just a terrific Modern and Very Moving Novel, period! The characterizations are so real, as well as the places and events, that I felt sad when I finished the book, almost as if I knew these people and their tragedy had touched me. One of the best boks I've read in some time.

The plot is familiar and the characters sharply drawn, but something about "Robbie's Wife" doesn't feel new. The writing is classic noir, and the atmosphere is dead on LA, but it wasn't until I remembered James cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice" that I knew where I had heard this plot before. Surely there are differences. Cain's effort has much more description, Hill's characters are more sharply drawn. If I had to chose I think this is the one I prefer if only because it is a quicker read and less preachy. This is the tenth Hard Case I've managed to read in the last year or so, and so far I think this is the best of the lot right after Mickey Spillane's contribution. Nevertheless I haven't been even a little disappointed yet with the series and will plod onward as time and my will permits.

This is a really great read with wonderful twists. I am a hard crime fan and this is one of the best I have read. The imagery of the country side is amazing and the character development...really great. Enjoy this one on a gloomy day with some hot cide.

"I kept thinking about how much of my life was accidental. I drank with the Stryker brothers and ended up in Maggie's house.... I could have stopped at the second beer and left Glastonbury, gone on to London and, even now, I would be in Los Angeles in a rented room rather than walking a country lane thinking of Maggie.... But it hadn't happened that way. I would not reflect on those events until it was too late." -- from Robbie's Wife Jack Stone has come from Los Angeles to England to make a new start. To get away from his second failed marriage and possibly write the screenplay that will rejuvenate his career. But he didn't count on falling in love with Maggie Barlow, the wife of a Dorset sheep farmer who offers a laid-back bed-and-breakfast arrangement. A Hard Case Crime novel by an award-winning poet? Is this another departure on a par with Straight Cut? Well, yes and no. Robbie's Wife is more typical noir than that book (especially in the second half), but author Russell Hill's superb characterizations will appeal to readers of all stripes. It may be the second Hard Case Crime novel in a row (after Lawrence Block's Lucky at Cards) to feature a newcomer-to-town who takes up with a married woman who is much more than the daily role she plays would lead us to believe, but otherwise Robbie's Wife could not be more different. It is a novel unto its own genre. I really admired Hill's giving a romantic storyline to characters who are older than the typical genre participants. Jack is sixty, while Maggie is a relative spring chicken at forty. But age really doesn't come into play at all, with Jack still expected to act out the requirements of Hill's surprise-filled plot with the strength and stamina of a much younger man. Love at a certain age is both riskier and more compelling than I had thought possible, but these two make it into quite an attractive proposition (especially during some of the most tastefully erotic sex scenes I've read in some time). Hill takes his time in offering up the expected noir trappings (essentially an update of familiar James M. Cain territory), but this allows the reader to get swept up in Jack and Maggie's illicit and delicious, heart-lifting and stomach-knotting relationship. Robbie's Wife is a beautiful, painfully tragic portrait of two people who, despite their attempts to the contrary, simply cannot stand to be away from each other. Like Jack states, "She was a magnet and I was nothing more than iron filings on a sheet of paper [darting] toward it, unable to do anything else." Interspersed among Jack's narrative of real events are pieces of his ongoing screenplay, which uses those real events for inspiration. Hill slips these in at unexpected times, and even uses them to distance us from a particularly harrowing scene as it plays out on the script page. It is a very welcome change of pace in a genre that often depends on the same old setup to get things moving. Things eventually get moving, all right, a