A Touch of Death by Charles Williams

I wouldn't recommend reading A Touch of Death and River Girl back-to-back. The similarities in these two fine novels by Charles Williams make it hard to appreciate their striking differences. 

In both novels our hero winds up in a stolen car with a beautiful woman and a wad of ill-gotten cash, driving country roads, on the run from police. Williams writes these chapters well, but I had a sense of deja vu.

But they are very different stories.

In River Girl, the man falls in love with a woman and scrounges enough cash so they can run away together. In A Touch of Death the man starts out needing cash, and accidentally winds up on the run with a beautiful woman he he hates . 

Rick Ollerman recommends A Touch of Death as "superbly crafted." He's right. It is tightly plotted without feeling clockwork, suspenseful without feeling melodramatic, and noir with being grotesque.

Ollerman says River Girl contains a lot of superfluous description. It does. I have to assume better editing would have made a masterpiece on par with A Touch of Death instead of merely very good.