I came to Tobias Hill's writing through his novel, The Love of Stones - which is also excellent - and Skin was really just an impulse buy when I was in England this Christmas. Well, The Love of Stones may be good, but Skin wowed me. This is a collection of short stories - not my bedtime reading of preference - but don't let that put you off. A couple of the stories here are long enough to escape into, and really the collection as a whole is a minor classic. Hill gets under the skin of every character and place he writes about. Think you know London? Think again. Ditto LA and downtown Japan. Hill often relies on outsiders to get inside places - immigrant zoo workers, Vegas croupiers, late night drifters - and the leverage he gets with this device gains massive momentum from the quality of his writing. If you haven't read anything by Hill, this would be a great place to start - it just blew me away.

This is a very good book. An almost outstanding book really. WHile reaidng it, I was carried away - I wished I lived in a mansion in Turkey, I thought I could be a gem-smuggler, I was entranced by the Victorian history.

So why not five stars? Was it the protagonist, Katherine, who is someone that you just can't feel for? While I would admit that I really didn't care what happened to her, it did not get in the way of enjoying the story. Was it the fact that the real stars of the show were inanimate things - the stones in question? No, I found them fascinating. Was it the fact that the story slid between two periods of time? No, that was done seamlessly.

What did lose it a star was the overly contrived elements - the love story that Katherine becomes involved in at the end (no more details in case you haven't read it yet) and the story of the rag-and-bones girl who becomes involved with the protagonists in the Victorian era story. Which is such a shame, because everything else in this story rang true, and was particularly well written

The other reviewers have talked about plot and character and I agree with the positive things they've said. But I want to talk about something else: the language. Tobias Hill is an extraordinarily talented writer. His economy of language, his inspired word choices, his awesome power of description, his ability to create living people in a few deft phrases are not only impressive, they are writing to savor.

Reading Hill's book is like eating truffles. You read slowly because you know there are only 396 pages and you don't want the book to end. I would offer sacrifices to the Gods of writing that Hill be prolific.

One more observation: every page on this book contains surprises--surprising dialog, suprising events, surprising characters...the kinds of surprises that real life presents you with, if you're lucky. I know this is fiction, but it has a quality of reality that is rarely found in fiction. If I could give it six stars, I would. I find myself buying copies and sending them to friends.

Tobias Hill's "The Love of Stones" (TLOS) is a historical thriller tracing the movement over the ages of the much coveted "Three Brethren" jewels which have passed through many hands and traversed many continents. There are two parallel and seemingly independent stories running alongside each other, one set in modern times and the other straddling the 19th & 20th centuries. Like two rivers, they cut through different terrains and flow at different speeds but finally converge in a surprise ending that may seem a little contrived but takes the novel into a whole new direction. Katherine Sterne, the heroine of the modern story, has only one thing on her mind. In her singleminded pursuit of the Three Brethrens, she takes inordinate risks with her own personal safety. Her obsession with jewels is neverly properly explained, although her final meltdown suggests there's blood coursing through her veins after all. Until then, she's a blank, unknowable and unlikeable. She doesn't make conversation. Her utterances are typically monosyllabic and bad tempered. We follow her escapades half the world over as she picks up on clues left by her most recent informant and closes in on her prey. The other story set in the past about two Iraqi-Jew brothers, Daniel and Salman, is more poetic and emotional. Like ying and yang, the contrasting natures of the two brothers balance but do not cancel each other out. While it is Salman's drive and determination that gets them to London and become royal jewellers to Queen Victoria, it is the more sentimental and steadfast Daniel that lasts the course. TLOS is a racy thriller filled with unexpected twists and turns and lots of seedy characters that spring from nowhere and just as quickly disappear. Of the minor characters, Eva Glott is the most well developed. Her incident with Sterne is especially memorable. TLOS is a finely crafted novel that makes absolutely rivetting reading. Hill's plotting is superb throughout except for the ending which betrays a slightly unsteady hand. His prose, on the other hand, like the jewels he writes about, can be hard and awkward in places. It takes getting used to but it's no trouble once you get the hang of it. One of the best novels I've read this season. Highly recommended.

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.

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.