I like Hill’s mystery novels, but only his Dalziel/Pascoe books are
generally available here in the States. As a result of cleaning up my
study, I’ve consolidated my to-be-read pile onto a couple of shelves.
Here’s a book I got on my last trip to Australia (several years ago)
that I only got around to reading this week.

Trudi Adamson has had a quiet life in the twenty-five years since she
got married. Her husband has taken jobs in Switzerland and in Vienna
and such-like romantic locales, and she, being shy and agoraphobic, has
spent most of them quietly at home ignoring the world while her husband
travels on business. Now her husband is dead in a car accident, leaving
her almost nothing, and she somehow has to learn to live by herself and
for herself. She crashes for some time, surviving only with the help of
an old friend from her school days, but eventually scrapes some gumption
together and gets a job.

And then, of course, peculiar things begin to happen. Her husband’s
death didn’t occur quite the way she’d been told. In fact, she begins
to come across evidence that her husband’s life away from home was rather
different than she’d thought. And that, of course, is just the beginning.

What we have here, really, is Charade artfully redone as a thriller
rather than as a screwball comedy with moments of violence. And without
Cary Grant, of course. As I was reading it, it all seemed a little too
farfetched, and Trudi’s metamorphosis from shy agoraphobia to
self-reliant assertiveness doesn’t quite work. Still, I wanted to find
out what happened, and the final twist was both unexpected
and rather touching.