ISBN: 006073535X The First Cut: A Novel of Suspense Authors : Peter Robinson Manufacturer:  Harper Paperbacks  Tell A Friend:   List Price:  $13.95             Your Price:  $11.86

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Martha Browne is a woman with a mission--to exact her revenge on the man known as the Student Slasher, who brutalized her and left her for dead. With a suitcase full of disguises and a partial memory of her attacker, she sets out on an odyssey that takes the reader into her mind and weaves past and present in a tense, intricate narrative that builds in suspense until its shockingly violent denouement. This reissue of one of Robinson's early novels, The Final Cut, which was never published in the U.S., shows the promise of an author (Close to Home) whose command of his craft was fully realized in his subsequent books; until his next new title is published, this haunting psychological thriller should keep his dedicated fans busy. --Jane Adams   Customer Reviews   no psychological thriller Rating:  After reading the online reviews of this book, I was all set for a psychological thriller, but it was anything but. It wasn't hard to figure out the ending about halfway through the book. I have read other Peter Robinson books that were much better. Prime Cut Rating:  This is an absorbing, intelligent psychological thriller. I appreciate the fact that much of the story unfolds in "real time." It isn't just a cut-to-the-chase type of tale. You sit watching, waiting with a character as she sits alone, looking out the window of a dingy tearoom. This pacing allowed me to be there - to be her. Which leads to another exceptional quality about this book. The author is a man, yet remarkably, he doesn't stand outside his female characters, appraising them, making them stand as models on parade before the reader. He empathizes with his female characters; he walks with them; he inhabits them. This is unfortunately a truely rare ability among male mystery writers - or, for that matter, male writers in any genre. The First Cut is the first Robinson mystery I've read. But you can be sure I'll be tracking down all of his other titles. A One Sitting Read Rating:  A young final-year English student is viciously attacked and left for dead by her assailant in a deserted city park as she is walking back to her flat from a end-of-year student party. There are practically no clues and the victim has little memory of what happened. Peter Robinson creates here a wondrously psychological and suspenseful tale of one woman's attempt at trying to put the pieces of her shattered life back together and her quest for revenge. This novel is rich in detail. Normal families and tourists are contrasted with the victims whose lives will never be the same again. Mr. Robinson makes the Yorkshire coast come alive. One can taste the bad food that England is famous for. His attention to detail is beautiful. There are "orderly riots of roses." A character's [Keith's] eyes "really were a sharp blue, as if he had spent so much time staring into blue skies and oceans that they had taken their color from the water and air." And Robinson describes the moon as "almost three-quarters full. . . It seemed to float there like an incandescent jellyfish just below the water's surface." Mr. Robinson artfully weaves together the stories of three women-- Martha, Kirsten and Susan-- into a page-turner climax, and makes interesting observations along the way on Thomas Hardy. It's obvious-- at least in this case-- that revenge is often neither pretty nor precise, but oh, so final. You'll read this novel in one sitting.

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