Product Description

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 the City of 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, too. 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 a malign 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 the 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42396 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

SUNDAY TIMES
'Truly unputdownable'

Customer Reviews

Howatch consistently touches my heart with her work.
I've read this book 3 times since it was published, as I do all Howatch's books. This novel gives us yet another twist on Nicholas and his coterie that is compelling and thoughtful, but also fun to read. Her books on the church consistently speak to me in a way that nothing else about Christianity does. Because of her, I'm becoming a "closet" Christian! I wish the Christians I've encountered were more like her characters -- real people with problems but also with integrity and commitment to something greater than themselves. When they are portrayed as rigid or stiff necked, the plot usually involves a BIG dose of humility accompanied by a change in perspective. These novels inspired me to expand my reading to include Farrer, Underhill, Julian of Norwich, and The Cloud of Unknowing. I check every week to see if she's got a new book coming out -- hope it's soon!

Enjoyable and thought provoking
This is the first book by Susan Howatch that I have read, and now I am in the process of finding her other books to read. The two main characters, Carter Graham and Kim Betz, are difficult to like at the begining of the book but the author pulls you into the story so well that you have to find out what happens to them. After the first couple of chapters, I found it very hard to put the book down. What I enjoyed most about the novel is the ending. Normally with a thriller you have the climatic finish and are left wondering what happens to the characters after that - but with the High Flyer the last 100 pages tell you the aftermath of the story. I found this book to be unique and fresh - it was a wonderful read.

Starbridge falling
To those of us who have read,and thoroughly enjoyed,the Starbridge novels in their entirety,this latest meeting with Darrow and Co will come as a great disappointment.The subtelty and mystique that kept us all rivetted to her earlier novels is completely absent in this book,and the theological eplanations and reasoning tend "take over" the narrative for the last hundred pages or so.
Not worthy of the Starbridge catagory at all.