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The Distance by Helen Giltrow
The Blurb On The Back:
I’ve always known the past might hunt me down, despite all my precautions, the false trails and the forged histories and everything else I’ve done to distance myself from it.
But not like this.
Charlotte Alton has put her old life behind her. The life where she bought and sold information, unearthing secrets buried too deep for anyone else to find, or fabricating new identities for people who need their pasts erased.
But now she has been offered one more job. To get a hit-man into an experimental new prison and take out someone who, according to the records, isn’t there at all.
It’s impossible. A suicide mission.
And quite possibly a set-up.
So why can’t she say no?
It’s the near future. Charlotte Alton runs a company dedicated to finding and selling information and hiding people who need to disappear. Ex-client and assassin Simon Johanssen tracks her down with a job offer, she knows that she should refuse. He wants access to The Program – an experimental prison run by its prisoners and known for being completely impenetrable – as he’s been hired to kill one of the inmates.
Charlotte knows this mission that could jeopardise everything she’s built but she and Simon have a connection and she can’t resist a puzzle. As the mission progresses however, Charlotte and Simon realise that there’s a lot they haven’t been told - not least that Simon’s target doesn’t apparently exist - and worse, their respective pasts are coming back to haunt them ...
Helen Giltrow’s debut thriller deals with the murky deals between national spy agencies and freelance contractors in a kind of Smiley meets SPOOKS storyline. It works best in contrasting the Moscow Rules techniques favoured by the old timers with the high-tech solutions of the modern and near-future world and I enjoyed the notion of the Program, which relies on prisoners effectively policing and rehabilitating themselves. Giltrow doesn’t spoon feed you this story – you need to pay attention as she introduces characters and background information without immediate explanation and the pay off won’t be obvious for several chapters. The story kept me turning the pages and it’s not until the end that you realise Giltrow relies heavily on contrivance and coincidence to bring her different plot strands together. Unfortunately, those contrivances did affect my overall enjoyment and while this book leaves with potential for a sequel, I’m not sure I’d rush to read it.
At the heart of the story is the supposed emotional connection between Charlotte and Simon but this isn’t really developed sufficiently on the page, making it difficult for me to buy into it – certainly not enough to explain why Charlotte would take the risks she does. The bigger problem is with the contrivances used to bolt the different storylines together, which rely on characters making assumptions that I thought strained at the seams. That’s a shame because there was a lot here that kept my attention – it’s just the ending that didn’t manage to bring it all together in a satisfactory way and as such, I’m not sure I’d read on.
The Verdict:
Helen Giltrow’s debut thriller deals with the murky deals between national spy agencies and freelance contractors in a kind of Smiley meets SPOOKS storyline. It works best in contrasting the Moscow Rules techniques favoured by the old timers with the high-tech solutions of the modern and near-future world and I enjoyed the notion of the Program, which relies on prisoners effectively policing and rehabilitating themselves. Giltrow doesn’t spoon feed you this story – you need to pay attention as she introduces characters and background information without immediate explanation and the pay off won’t be obvious for several chapters. The story kept me turning the pages and it’s not until the end that you realise Giltrow relies heavily on contrivance and coincidence to bring her different plot strands together. Unfortunately, those contrivances did affect my overall enjoyment and while this book leaves with potential for a sequel, I’m not sure I’d rush to read it.
THE DISTANCE will be released in the United Kingdom on 8th May 2014. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the ARC of this book.
But not like this.
Charlotte Alton has put her old life behind her. The life where she bought and sold information, unearthing secrets buried too deep for anyone else to find, or fabricating new identities for people who need their pasts erased.
But now she has been offered one more job. To get a hit-man into an experimental new prison and take out someone who, according to the records, isn’t there at all.
It’s impossible. A suicide mission.
And quite possibly a set-up.
So why can’t she say no?
It’s the near future. Charlotte Alton runs a company dedicated to finding and selling information and hiding people who need to disappear. Ex-client and assassin Simon Johanssen tracks her down with a job offer, she knows that she should refuse. He wants access to The Program – an experimental prison run by its prisoners and known for being completely impenetrable – as he’s been hired to kill one of the inmates.
Charlotte knows this mission that could jeopardise everything she’s built but she and Simon have a connection and she can’t resist a puzzle. As the mission progresses however, Charlotte and Simon realise that there’s a lot they haven’t been told - not least that Simon’s target doesn’t apparently exist - and worse, their respective pasts are coming back to haunt them ...
Helen Giltrow’s debut thriller deals with the murky deals between national spy agencies and freelance contractors in a kind of Smiley meets SPOOKS storyline. It works best in contrasting the Moscow Rules techniques favoured by the old timers with the high-tech solutions of the modern and near-future world and I enjoyed the notion of the Program, which relies on prisoners effectively policing and rehabilitating themselves. Giltrow doesn’t spoon feed you this story – you need to pay attention as she introduces characters and background information without immediate explanation and the pay off won’t be obvious for several chapters. The story kept me turning the pages and it’s not until the end that you realise Giltrow relies heavily on contrivance and coincidence to bring her different plot strands together. Unfortunately, those contrivances did affect my overall enjoyment and while this book leaves with potential for a sequel, I’m not sure I’d rush to read it.
At the heart of the story is the supposed emotional connection between Charlotte and Simon but this isn’t really developed sufficiently on the page, making it difficult for me to buy into it – certainly not enough to explain why Charlotte would take the risks she does. The bigger problem is with the contrivances used to bolt the different storylines together, which rely on characters making assumptions that I thought strained at the seams. That’s a shame because there was a lot here that kept my attention – it’s just the ending that didn’t manage to bring it all together in a satisfactory way and as such, I’m not sure I’d read on.
The Verdict:
Helen Giltrow’s debut thriller deals with the murky deals between national spy agencies and freelance contractors in a kind of Smiley meets SPOOKS storyline. It works best in contrasting the Moscow Rules techniques favoured by the old timers with the high-tech solutions of the modern and near-future world and I enjoyed the notion of the Program, which relies on prisoners effectively policing and rehabilitating themselves. Giltrow doesn’t spoon feed you this story – you need to pay attention as she introduces characters and background information without immediate explanation and the pay off won’t be obvious for several chapters. The story kept me turning the pages and it’s not until the end that you realise Giltrow relies heavily on contrivance and coincidence to bring her different plot strands together. Unfortunately, those contrivances did affect my overall enjoyment and while this book leaves with potential for a sequel, I’m not sure I’d rush to read it.
THE DISTANCE will be released in the United Kingdom on 8th May 2014. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the ARC of this book.