Praises for Downtown Noir

"... That was a kick ass story...!  It was awesome!!  I could totally picture this all happening... clear as day...!"

"...I loved it.  I felt like I was there! I could see each place. Just when I thought I had things figured out you would throw a curve ball! I really couldn't put it down because I had to know what was going on...!"

"...It was a really good read, from start to finish. I love a book that takes me on a journey, that I have never been on before. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, another plot twist would pop up. I love that..."

"...I can't put it down for long periods of time...It is a crime novel that has you hooked once you start reading it!!..."

Patrik Hill’s Downtown Noir is one hell of a ride: somewhere between a literary bucking bronco and a fictional roller coaster. This is noir for the genuine noir lover, not the faint of heart: the pages bleed—literally—with tales of tough guys, femme fatales, back alley firefights, armed gangs, mano a mano street brawls, strung-out druggies, grisly decapitations, scalpings, explosions, and a general cesspool of heinous criminality, culminating in unspeakable evils which I will leave for the reader to discover. The pages of this action-packed thriller practically turn themselves as one crime leads to another in an ever-escalating web of mayhem. Just when you think that the story can’t possibly go any further, Hill flips another page, opening up a whole new vista even more destructive than the previous. So take a deep breath before you get started because once you get into it the novel’s frenetic pace is relentless: it keeps you perched precariously on the edge of your seat as the plot twists and turns, barely pausing for you to come up for air.

Unlike most noir, however, Downtown Noir is largely set not in a crime-strewn city, but in a quiet mountain college town, Bozeman, MT, mixing slightly fictionalized local details with a gripping thriller that is normally confined to the seediest of urban ghettos. But Hill breathes life into his tale until he somehow makes it all seem counterintuitively believable, revealing how crime can fester in the most unsuspecting places. After finishing this book, you may feel that no place is safe, and if you are willing to look closely enough, Hill suggests, no place probably is. But that is the charm and thrill of this novel which lives at the crossroads between the idyllic and the degenerate, the unsuspecting and the unbelievable.

Allen Ginsberg said that the best minds of his generation drug themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. Patrik Hill’s Downtown Noir is just that: an angry fix for the true noir aficionado, madness and mayhem in print, page after page of hard-boiled chaos and carnage. A damn good read, indeed!

Robert Bennett

English Department

Montana State University

Bozeman, MT