The High Flyer: Number 2 in series (St. Benet's) - Softcover

Howatch, Susan

3.91

1,043 ratings by Goodreads

9780751530414: The High Flyer: Number 2 in series (St. Benet's)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0751530417 ISBN 13: 9780751530414

Publisher: Sphere, 2001

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WHEN YOU LIVE THE DREAM, YOU LIVE THE CONSEQUENCES... Cool, blonde Carter Graham is a successful lawyer who believes she is well on the way to reaching all the goals listed in her glamorous life plan: first-class job, a stylish flat in London, and marriage to the man of her dreams, Kim Betz. But Carter forgot that sometimes the best laid dreams turn into nightmares. Kim's ex-wife Sophie starts to stalk her and Kim turns from being the self-contained, controlled husband into a man who lies not only about his past but about his present. Carter finds herself drawn into an expanding web of deceit, corruption and evil which eventually threatens not only her sanity but her life. What is it that Sophie is trying so hard to tell her? Who is the sinister Mrs Mayfield, who has such an influence on Kim? And what is the significance of the other new man in Carter's life, her secretary Eric Tucker? Carter seeks help from the healers of St. Benets, the enigmatic Nicholas Darrow, the eccentric Lewis Hall, and kind, thoughtful Alice but even they cannot save her from a searing ordeal as she struggles to uncover the truth about the tormented man she has married.

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Review:

"When I first saw my temporary secretary it never occurred to me to flirt with him". The bemused confidence and upended assumption of this first sentence from The High Flyer, by Susan Howatch, reveal a great deal about the character who speaks it and the shape of this novel as a whole. The narrator, Carter Graham, is a successful London lawyer--a "high flyer"--whose thoroughly secular plan for a perfect life (clothes, car, kids, etc.) is proceeding quite punctually, thanks to her strong sense of entitlement and her talent for social manipulation. The story that follows, however, undermines Carter's confident assumptions regarding the inner lives of the people around her. Carter meets and marries another high flyer, a charming business titan named Kim. Slowly, Carter learns of Kim's involvement in the occult, his Nazi past and the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of his former wife. As the mysteries of Kim's past are revealed to Carter, Kim's personality undergoes a deep and demonic transformation. Carter, terrified, seeks shelter at a Christian healing centre, where a cast of clerics and lay people help Carter reconstruct a life for herself, and a theological and psychological framework that makes some sense of the blindness and betrayal that destroyed her life with Kim. "[C]reation's not about efficiency", explains one character, "it's about love. It's about shedding blood, sweat and tears to make the thing you care about come right. It's about enduring the shadow side of creation and using it so that in the end everything can be brought into the light". The novel's greatest strength is its suspenseful plotting, which calls to mind (thanks in part to the narrator's frequent allusions to) the films of Alfred Hitchcock.. --Michael Joseph Gross

Review:

I picked up her latest, THE HIGH FLYER, and put it down only to start the preceding one...The woman's brilliant! (YOU MAGAZINE)

Unputdownable...hugely ambitious (DAILY EXPRESS)

Howatch's skills as a novelist are consummate: her characters and her contexts live...One of the bravest books I've read (CHURCH TIMES)

A satisfying mix of psychological thriller and spiritual drama. (GOOD HOUSEKEEPING)

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