Customer Reviews

Underground

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A fable of the London Underground, Tobias Hill continues to impress with this novel that follows the travels and obsessions of a Polish immigrant who labors in the Underground, and who gradually becomes drawn in to an investigation of a series of killings. A mystery as well as a tale of isolation, the hero works through his own demons (from childhood and after) while searching for a more tangible one in the present while connecting (or failing to do so) with those around him....

This is the first book of Tobias Hill's that I've read. It caught my interest because I'd lived in London for 10 years and always been interested in the 'city beneath a city' feel of the Tube.

The story is a thriller: women are being pushed under trains and all the victims have something in common - they look alike. Casimir is a Tube worker with a hidden past. Two stories develop in parallel: Casimir and his Polish upbringing, and the hunt for the killer. Hill takes the reader deep into the tunnels and long-forgotten rooms of the Underground while delving deep into Casimir's buried past.

I found the book switching narrative frustrating at first but as the stories developed and interwove the switches became part of the suspense.

Tobias Hill's descriptions evoke the Underground with extreme clarity - you can't help feeling the damp and claustrophobia of being deep below the surface. If you've ever used the Tube in London and wondered where those sealed-off doors go or ever glimpsed a long-abandoned station through the train window - this book is for you.

Anyone who has visited London will remember the stations on the London underground ("subway" to Americans). In the deepest stations, elevators carry passengers to the bowels of the earth, where they trek through narrow, twisting, tubular passageways to the train platform. It can easily be claustrophobic, and during slack periods, a little spooky. Other passageways, leading to abandoned elevator shafts or abandoned air raid shelters, are barricaded. This is the setting of Tobias Hill's murder mystery, in which a subway maintenance worker who knows his station like the palm of his hand, matches wits against a murderer who knows the station even more intimately. This novel has great potential as a screenplay, with some visuals that would translate well to the silver screen. However, there is a "b plot" consisting of flashbacks to the lead character's childhood, that detracted seriously from the main plot. Also, while the action scenes were well-written, I had difficulty following certain other aspects of the plot.