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Robbie's Wife (Mass Market Paperback)

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Key Phrases: flying monk, car hire agency, cuppa tea, Jack Stone, Robbie's Wife, Sheepheaven Farm (more...)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Poet, novelist and Fulbright fellow Hill (Lucy Boomer) brings seductive intensity to this story of quiet desperation and the corrupting effects of obsession. Jack Stone, a 60-year-old Los Angeles screenwriter down on his luck and seeking inspiration, journeys to England for what he hopes will be a creative reawakening. Instead, all he finds is an endless supply of rain, pubs and bad food. Things get interesting when he stumbles upon Sheepheaven Farm, where Robbie Barlow keeps a bed and breakfast with his wife, Maggie, a tall woman with long auburn hair who moves like the dancer she used to be. Restless and magnetic, Maggie exudes sexually charged charm toward Jack, some 20 years her senior, even as she tends to cranky Robbie and their school-age son. As his stay wears on, Jack grows increasingly fixated and, when authorities threaten to slaughter the Sheepheaven herd in the face of an epidemic, he finds the inspiration not just to begin writing again but to make a move for Maggie. Those seeking a more action-packed Hard Case (such as Max Allan Collins's The Last Quarry) may be disappointed with Hill's deliberate pace, but he holds his own in the pulp genre, lending graceful writing and three-dimensional characters to some risky dalliances and gratifying last-act plot twists. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist

The publisher has made itself a going concern by showing a shrewd eye for reprinted pulp fiction and originals that are often as good as the reprints. Robbie's Wife, a neat update on The Postman Always Rings Twice, falls into the latter category. Jack Stone, a middle-aged L.A. screenwriter whose career is in need of a fresh start, pulls up stakes and heads to rural England, where he plans to hole up until he's written something that makes "a piss-pot full of money." But inspiration proves elusive--that is, until he stops at a bed-and-breakfast run by enigmatic sheep-farmer Robbie Barlow and his ethereal, unhappy wife, Maggie. Hill (Lucy Boomer, 1992) does a nice job of developing Stone's dangerous obsession, and his ear for local dialogue demonstrates his wide range as a writer. Setting the story against the mad-cow epizootic is a deft stroke, too, adding oppressive atmosphere and timely detail. This might be a bit brooding for some crime fans, and the ending could use more punch, but all in all, it's well worth an evening. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

  • Mass Market Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Hard Case Crime; Reprint edition (February 27, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0843957697
  • ISBN-13: 978-0843957693
  • Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #723,946 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

More About the Author

Russell Hill
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Customer Reviews

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Certain to be one of the year's best, March 31, 2007
By Craig Clarke (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)      
"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, and they quickly spiral out of control, but never from Hill's point of view. He guides every part of the novel's evocative (and, in the right places, provocative) plotline with a sure hand to its powerfully shocking conclusion. With a fascinating mix of the familiar and the not new but nearly forgotten, Robbie's Wife is sure to be one of the ten best books of 2007.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A welcome departure, March 15, 2007
By Elderkin (Rockville, MD) - See all my reviews
This was about the 10th book in the Hardcase Crime series that I have read and it was much different than all of the others. While it had some elements of crime noir fiction, it was much more literary and much more deliberate. It had none of the rapid fire, crackle and snap of other stories, but that is not a bad thing. If you are looking for Lawrence Block or Erle Stanley Garder type fiction, look elsewhere, but if you want a different take on noir fiction read "Robbie's Wife".
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Several nice surprises, February 3, 2008
By Jeff "Jeff" (Northern California) - See all my reviews
  
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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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Crime of Passion
With its air of brooding menace, its American leading man in a rural British setting and its stifled sexual passion, I was half expecting this novel to be something along the... Read more
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5.0 out of 5 stars SIMPLY TERRIFIC!!
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... Read more
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5.0 out of 5 stars deja vu!
The plot is familiar and the characters sharply drawn, but something about "Robbie's Wife" doesn't feel new. Read more
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4.0 out of 5 stars A new take on "The Postman Always Rings Twice"
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5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT READ
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. Read more
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4.0 out of 5 stars Noir Narrative Made New
Russell Hill, Robbie's Wife
Review by R. R. Beaumont

After selling all his belongings, a screenwriter in the twilight of his career moves to rural England... Read more
Published on March 26, 2007 by R.R. Beaumont

4.0 out of 5 stars unexpected twist is great
i found this book to be a bit slow going at first. But the further i read on the more the story pulled me in. Great ending with a twist i did not see coming. Read more
Published on February 22, 2007 by Greg Corsten

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