Review: Robbie's Wife

Jack Stone, a sixty-year old screen-writer quits L.A. after his second failed marriage, matched by a career on the slide. He packs his laptop and his life savings into a duffel bag, heading to Dorset; a sleepy agricultural backwater in England’s South West to write the killer screenplay that will get him back on track. His precarious financial situation is the ticking clock that is marbled across the narrative. Finding himself a lodger in the Barlow household’s spare-room, he struggles to get a handle for his screenplay; until he meets Maggie Barlow, the eponymous Robbie [Barlow’s] Wife. Robbie is a rugged sheep farmer, but with a university education who befriends Stone, taking him in after his car is vandalised. Robbie is in his early forties and handsome contrasting with the aging Stone who at sixty considers himself on the losing side of his career as well as his life.

Stone befriends Robbie and Maggie’s son – Terry; in ways that make Maggie realise that perhaps he is more fatherly than her husband Robbie. Soon Stone feels himself falling in love with Maggie, who is over twenty-years his junior, and as he does, he finds his lust expressing itself in his writing. As his fevered mind feels the attraction of this comely farmer’s wife, his screenplay starts to take shape; a dark shape.

The location and atmosphere is rich in detail and texture with the insight of the outsider making it fresh and deeply evocative. The only fault is that perhaps a British copy-editor should have been consulted as there are quite a few gaffes and lapses that jar a British reader.

Due to the novels trajectory, the first three-quarters build up the tension until it becomes unbearable, both from a sexual as well as a character perspective. Once all this build-up is released, and the crime committed, the tale then goes into a downward race as Jack Stone finds the price he must pay for his actions both morally, as well as criminally are going to cost him dearly. Men being manipulated by their base urges have been fruitful fodder for crime-writers for years, but this one puts a spin on it. In ‘Robbie’s Wife’, the shapely married femme fatale is attracted not to the handsome stranger, because she is actually married to the handsome man; but is attracted to an elderly man, the stranger down on his luck. It will provide much more thinking time after you put the book down, than the two and half hours it takes to read this tremendous tale.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Ali Karim - RAM

Book Review: Robbie's Wife